Secret Asian Man- Trash in(g) Amman

Long time readers may recall this writer’s infatuation with trash and how it gets where it’s going.  I feel like I’ve spoken about it a lot. From looking out my front window, this is my thoughts about how garbage is handled in Amman once we generate it and leave it outside of our front door. .All of this is based on hearsay and observation.

Sulieman our boab, (house elf) , makes a couple of rounds per day to all the units in our building collecting garbage and taking it to a set of dumpsters in the vacant lot next door. This is combined with trash from 8 or 10 other buildings.  Dumpsters are dispersed every 500 feet or so on the main roads.  Back streets have a bit longer walk to throw things away.

A standard city garbage truck swings by and empties dumpsters 4 or more times per week.  I don’t see them on Fridays, but they can show up most days usually just before dawn, and just before my alarm is set to ring.  

In between collections, a variety of other visitors happen by the dumpster.  It starts with the cats.  I don’t know where they go when the dumpsters are empty, but when full each dumpster generally has 2 or 3 felines per dumpster. Balanced along the rim or deep inside the garbage. Sustained on a diet of plastic bags and food scraps. I haven’t seen a lot of rats, but certainly there must be some.  

Bedouins or refugees make the rounds of the neighborhood.  Typically, they have a rusty white pick up or other utility vehicle that leans to one side, is lacking a muffler and most functioning forms of illumination. The driver stops, hops out and grabs a nearby rock to throw under the front wheel to save him having to chase his car down the hill.  

He proceeds to pull plastic bags out of the dumpster and throw the contents on the ground, taking what he needs. Usually metal, but also cardboard, cloth and other scraps.  The remainder is scattered to the winds.  The plastic bags take flight. Jordanians call plastic bags, their national bird.

Glass is not recycled. And after nearly 2 years of wondering why, I finally learned the answer.

The areas around dumpsters are strewn with broken glass. I wondered for a while, why glass wasn’t more valued.  We tried for a while to gather glass separately, but it would be taken to the dumpster and then thrown on the ground.  

It turns out that the closest glass recycling plant was in Syria. After the troubles there, the border shut down and no one could get the used glass up there, so the market crashed and no one wanted glass.  Another consequence of the ongoing conflict there.

The ground around the dumpster, as you can imagine, becomes a bit of a toxic mess of glass, food scraps and other detritus.  Bin Men circulate and sweep and scoop things up and try and keep things manageable. 

Once a month, a front-end loader drives by and either scoops up trash or grades over it with a thin layer of dirt and rock and for a week or so, things look rather tidy.

If you want to get rid of more valuable items, the scrap buyer circulates. A large loudspeaker mounted on the cab announces what he’s buying.  It plays and ear splitting volumes.  He cycles around twice, so when you hear him the first, you move your stuff to the curb and catch him the second time around.  

Where the collected trash goes from the dumpster, I’m not sure.  I presume to a landfill of some sort.  Some place where all the “birds’ can roost together and flap in the wind.

On the Rock

I'm back in Papua New Guinea, the other end of the island. Not much has changed in Port Moresby. Major road construction projects are winding up and it's easier to get around it seems.

One such project is an overpass built expressly for a big regional political meeting coming up in two years time. This overpass will swish dignitaries directly from the airport to the meeting site and

by-pass all the traffic and potential carjacking points and scenes of poverty. These meetings are great to expose these countries to world leaders, but I wonder about resources better spent on things like food and water and health care. But maybe there's some bigger plan.

The Australians have contracted with the Papuans to put a refugee camp here.  The Aussies  have taken a hard line against people coming to their shore by boat.  It may not make the news back home, but they intercept folks coming by boat and put them in camps where conditions are considered pretty bleak. On the island of Nauru, distressed refugees are immolating themselves to protest conditions. Recently the Supreme Court in PNG ruled that these camps in Papua New Guinea violated the constitution and they should be closed.

Coincidentally, on Papua, some refugees have been let out of the camps to live in the community as regular citizens.  A number of them, though have asked to move back into the camps citing safety reasons.

I just finished reading “Savage Harvest” by Carl Hoffman. He goes back and investigates the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller way back in 1961.  The grandson of John D  Rockefeller was off collecting primitively art in western Papua when he disappeared while boating off the coast. Despite an extensive search his body was never found. It was thought he was swept out to sea or was even by sharks, but was also rumored he swam ashore and was eaten by cannibals. I leave it to you to read more, but the book is fascinating look at some of the ageless spirituality that infuses the people of this region.

On my way to the airport, the driver told me an interesting story.

We passed by a rock, a huge boulder of granite. He told me that back in 1990 as they were building the road to the airport they had to carve a pass over a mountain.  They carved down through the mountain and hauled all the rock down to the harbor and dumped it there. They packed it all down and have started building on it as reclaimed land.

But, he pointed to the big boulder that had been fenced off by the side of the road, and said that they hauled that particular rock down to the shore 5 or 6 times, but every time they did they found it moved back to its original site up the hill.  After a few times, they decided they needed to talk to the rock to see what the problem may be.  

They found landowners who had some rights to the land and they asked them to come talk to the rock. They did, but the rock didn't listen until finally, they found an ancestor of some of the original people of the Port Moresby area. They had been displaced to up into the hills when the city was built. These people came and they talked to the rock and the rock talked back and they were able to reach a compromise where the rock would agree to be moved to the side of the road, but didn't have to go down to the beach.

So there it sits. Some 5 tons of stone. They've even built a little wall around it. Whether that's to keep the rock in or people out is not known.

He proceeded to tell me about a sacred spring that is inhabited by a snake spirit.  No one is allowed to swim there or fish there.  But, a the end of the dry season, when everyone is hungry and tired of the dust and the heat, they send someone up into the hills to splash about and make noise and soon after a flood comes and usually kills some people or destroys things.  

The loss is a payment to the gods, but at least they have rain.  

“Yeah, we've got a lot of stories about spirits and ghosts. It all goes way, way back.”  All that from a cab ride.  Well worth the fare.