Beauty and Trash

El Salvador is a country of stunning beauty.  The same fault-line placement that renders it susceptible to seismic activity and landslides created a collection of volcanoes now covered by lush vegetation.  Juxtaposed with this natural beauty are tremendous quantities of trash.  In parts of San Salvador, I saw bags of trash piled on roofs of corrugated metal.  Heavy rains in the evenings swept a flow of garbage into the streambeds on the side of the volcano.  Even high above the town, where I could not imagine much refuse could gush down from above, the sheer quantity of litter surprised me.  In San Ramon, plastic wrappers, cartons, even clothing littered the streets.  This problem’s causes are not strictly meteorological and geographic – nor are they simply attributable to a lack of services.  Anita, who hosted me for a couple of weeks, lamented that such litter is the norm even though some parts of San Ramon do have sanitation services.  And of course the plastic that protects and preserves our stuff so conveniently and cheaply does not disintegrate back into the earth in short order.

On my first day in San Ramon, Hector had me hauling buckets of dirt, mud, wood, and even garbage with him as we cleared and leveled the floor of an outdoor kitchen behind the tiny house of a single mother of two children.  The rains that bring garbage down the mountainside had also deposited enough dirt and mud to make her kitchen unusable.  We toted the buckets up the street and dumped them onto a broken-up part of the road, filling in gaps where the pavement had crumbled or washed away.  I kept expecting someone to holler at us for dumping trash on the street, or for someone official to come ask for our permit.  No such thing.  I guess that as long as we were covering more trash than we were dumping, filling more holes than we were creating, nobody minded much.

A couple of years ago, I bought a kite.  I went to an actual kite store on Nantasket Beach and bought a kite that is designed to be taken apart and stowed in a small sack.  Well, it’s designed to be flown, but when you aren’t flying it, you take it apart and stow it.  It’s marketed as a kite for backpacking, believe it or not, but I was attracted by the idea of being able to carry it easily while riding my bike.  Pope John Paul II Park in Dorchester, MA, not far from me, tends to have great breezes for flying kites.  Some weekend days, kiting clubs fill the sky there with all manner of different designs.  If I recall correctly, I spent $27 on this kite.    Once I got it going, it was pretty relaxing, actually, and to be honest, I had never really flown a kite before.  (Whatever the Sunday comics might try to tell you, my North American childhood did not entail packs of kids running down to the sandlot with our homemade kites of various designs.)  I rode over to the park and flew it maybe a dozen times, perhaps twenty, but now the little plastic tubing that houses the shock cord is splitting.  I am not sure how easy it will be to salvage.  To tell the truth, my first instinct is just to replace it. 

Back to that first day in San Ramon, after a morning hauling dirt, in the afternoon we walked up the volcano to Las Nubes, “to visit some friends of mine,” said Hector.  I asked him why he didn’t have any friends who lived closer!  We reached one house just as the heavens opened.  Hector artfully arranged scrap pieces of corrugated metal, Rube Goldberg style, to direct water into empty oil drums.  In a house without running water, the downpour was an opportunity.  We stayed until the rain cleared.  As we walked on to our next stop, we met three children, about eight years old, playing in the road.  On the shaded, almost windless road, they were trying to fly kites, kites that they had fashioned out of sticks and the plastic bags that had washed down the gulley at the side of the road.  Hector helped the boys secure string to the sticks and launched the kites into the air.  They stayed airborne for a little while before they fluttered to the ground.  The kids were delighted that they had stayed up in the air so long.  Hector launched their kites one more time, and we walked on to visit another family.