Feeling Trashy

I spent my Friday afternoon two weeks ago whipping up an impromptu batch of oatmeal cookies (they are my staple, since I know I can make them with the ingredients on hand, the kitchen tools and pans I have at my disposal, and they are pretty quick and a tested recipe).

Why, you ask? Because I needed a peace offering, or at least a good faith kind of gesture, for when I went to ring the bell at my neighbor's courtyard next door.

We have been a little slow to understand the local customs surrounding neatness and cleaning the public area around your house and gates. The main way this issue has made itself relevant to us is in the thin sliver of land running alongside and just outside our courtyard wall, located around the corner from our entry gate. People decided that this was a good place to dump their trash -- plastic bottles, discarded half-eaten fruit, even full plastic bags of trash (and one of dirty diapers) that were clearly headed for a more formal garbage tip but we can only assume someone got lazy on the way and relieved himself of the burden at the first chance he got.

My hazy memory from when we first moved in (everything was new, so it's hard to recall what that space looked like then) is that this was not the cleanest area even then. And that's believable, since our rented home had not been occupied for at least several weeks if not a few months, after the Embassy acquired it and while they were bringing it as far up to code as it can reasonably get in Dushanbe, and until we moved in.

Another factor here, I think, (although I feel a little sheepish expressing it) is that I think my perception of what was clean and neat has changed as I've gotten used to my surroundings. I haven't taken or posted all that many photos of our neighborhood, but the couple we have on Flickr may give a hint of a sense of what the immediate environment looks like.

I think you can see how the streets are pretty uneven and in places unpaved, the household walls are sort of patchy and not all evenly painted, and there is grass or moss growing in the cracks, and random rocks lying around. But you'll also notice that there's hardly any real trash lying around (gladly, much different from our surroundings in Vladivostok...). I think what I'm saying is, it took me a few weeks or maybe even closer to a couple of months to start to perceive the difference between "neat, if shabby" and "straight-up trashy." That, and I do think that as we neared the New Year's holiday, for whatever reason (possibly simply the tipping point was reached, and it just started to strike passers-by with garbage to toss as all that much more tempting, and struck them that way all that much more frequently), the garbage really started to accumulate.

At this point we started noticing it more and more -- first remarking to ourselves about what was happening, and then finally feeling the lightbulb come on about the fact that there wasn't any city sanitation that was going to finally clear this junk, but it was probably on us.

I took a brief walk with Anya in between Christmas and New Year's, and while I was waiting for her to finish a little tantrum related to the fact that she was being made to walk a few blocks instead of being carried, I was watching out of the corner of my eye a woman and a boy of probably about 10, who were sweeping and cleaning out in front of their compound's metal gates. They were mainly having to sweep dead leaves, but they were also of course picking up a few small pieces of trash that had found their way there, too. I also watched as they used their short handmade Tajik brooms and a big metal dustpan to collect the debris in the wide, deep, open gutter running parallel to the street in front of their house -- the same as the gutters that line all of the streets here in Dushanbe, including our neighborhood, and which generally have a small but lively stream of water running through them. (You can see it skirting the corner in the photo above.)

It occurred to me then: hmmm, we don't really do that at our house -- let alone the trash-on-the-side-of-the-house problem, we don't ever really do that kind of neatening up in the front. I felt a little bit ashamed, but also kind of annoyed: how the hell was I supposed to fit another new domestic task into my day or my week? Or should I add this to the tasks that our housekeeper, who comes two days a week, performs? And I realized, yet again, how (and why) the typical residents of these large private houses situated around a courtyard (havli, in Tajik) are large, extended families, with multiple women and girls (and the occasional boy) who are not employed outside the home but who perform this kind of domestic work that keeps the place running smoothly.

Cut back to our growing awareness of the garbage problem. When it wasn't covered up with snow, we definitely were seeing it plainly and coming around to the fact that we needed to deal with it. But we made excuses. We lamely despaired that we didn't have the tools to gather it all up -- no work gloves to protect our hands; no shovel to get all the wet gunk in the wide street-side gutter or the rotting piles scattered on the strip of grass. We didn't have time -- we'd notice it on our way home or out, when we couldn't really stop and do anything more than make a tiny dent in the job that needed to be done. We'd just remark at how annoying it was, and other people's deed, and bury our heads to the problem.

Dan went out for two extended pick-up sessions one Saturday, using the obvious solution to the no-gloves problem by protecting his hands with plastic bags, and heaving the stuff into several of the huge plastic garbage bags I'd mistakenly bought at the grocery store a while back (finally, a good use, in our household populated with un-American small garbage cans!). But he wasn't able to get all of it, and the dumping continued. (And, strangely we thought, two men who passed by during one of his pick-ups, who'd been conversing in Tajik, switched to Russian as they neared Dan, and said something that he interpreted as a kind of hmph-y tut-tutting of a reaction: "He's collecting it! Filthy!")

Then, one morning when Anya and I got into the car with the driver who takes us most days to and from sadik, he started to relate to me the exchange he'd had with our next-door neighbor as he was waiting. I found myself feeling ashamed and outraged and annoyed and probably several other things, all rolled into one bad sensation. It turned out that the local communal services board representative had come with the intention of talking either to the landlady of our house or to the neighbor himself (I never got the whole story), in order to deliver a complaint about the trash. The neighbor then hired some workmen to pick up the area, and get rid of two cypresses on the strip that had seen recent damage, too. He told our driver that he understood that we weren't throwing the trash, but that the area had to be kept clean, including keeping under control the overgrowth of grass that has nothing to do with dumping but which has stopped up the drainage canal since before we moved in. It wasn't immediately obvious to us as we rode in the car that morning how this was all going to proceed in the future (and really it still isn't).

We aren't sure whether this is our responsibility, or the landlady's, or the embassy's. (And I suspect it doesn't really matter -- it seems pretty plain to me that if it isn't dealt with, the trash problem will be our problem by default, by virtue of its visibility and the perception that, if it exists, we're shirking our duty.)

When I brought over the cookies and thanked our neighbor for the help, he said he planned to keep the area clean, and I of course protested that it was certainly not his responsibility. I think we hope that, now that the real cleaning has been done, we'll be aware of the problem and can maintain the area fairly easily by picking up the now very noticeable pieces of trash that get deposited there bit by bit. (Something I've started contributing to when I have the chance as soon as I can after returning home, if I've noticed a real increase in bits of trash.) And we even purchased a shovel at the neighborhood open-air market -- choosing the blade and requesting that the seller carve an appropriate handle for it -- in order to try to chip away at the vegetation in the canal. (We haven't begun to actually use it yet, but we did buy it!) In any case, however it develops further, the whole affair has opened our eyes to the communal relations in the neighborhood and to our part within them.