Garbage Talk

One of the additional tasks of living in Ukarumpa is that you have to separate your garbage. You have burnable, wet garbage, and other. So this means you keep three different buckets in your house and are constantly making decisions of how to sort your garbage when you throw it away. Also, if your garbage is in the "other" category, like tin cans and stuff, you are asked to wash it clean. I think this is because while their storing it in the trucks and containers before it's taken to the dump, it attracts a number of dogs and rodents that like to rummage around it.


Anyway, you burn your burnables when you decide you have enough to burn. As for the wet garbage, that's anything that could be used as compost and every home has either a compost pit, or a compost pile. Some of the compost pits are hard to find and from the surface, all you see is a strand peice of concrete on the ground. Here is a picture of the one we had our first week at Ukarumpa while we stayed in the temprorary housing (Translator Lodge 8B).

The other slightly unfortunate problem with having a wet garbage, is that even though ours has a lid over the bucket, it can get rather stinky pretty quickly. The banana peels mixed with all the other random things from toast crust to carrot tops can make make for a slimmy mixture. It actually smells like dirty feet! While Meliah and I were doing dishes one night I think I inadvertently gave her a complex by telling her that her feet smelled really bad. But today I discovered it wasn't her feet, it was the wet garbage.

Yes.... I apologized to her :)