Back to the Middle Ages

There was a celebration in Bairiki Square in May to encourage people to use the ‘Green Bag.’ The Green Bag is a plastic garbage bag where you can put your rubbish and on certain days of the week depending on which Tarawa islet you live on, a truck comes and collects the bags on the main road and delivers to the dump. The bags cost 20 cents which is a cheap even here but only a few stores sell the bags.  I am not sure why but it could be because they have to pay for the bags upfront.

Littering in Tarawa is one of the big issues to solve. Honestly, you couldn’t hope to see a more beautiful island but the locals except for the trash that can be given to pigs and dogs prefer to throw it down. It doesn’t matter if they are on the beach, outside their own house, on the road or in the Tarawa Lagoon. My neighbors even like to throw their trash over the fence into my yard I guess because they have run out of room in their own.

Trash dominates the landscape and some seem quite comfortable with it or maybe they just accept things as there.

Littering of course is not precluded to Tarawa. It does go on in other places even where there are hefty fines for doing so. But in other places the trash may be less intrusive because of the larger land masses.  Tarawa, on the other hand, is a small space. The population per square meter on the Betio islet for example exceeds that of Hong Kong.

I know that there are people who are waiting for someone to invent a time machine so they can travel back to the Middle Ages. Luckily for me I don’t need the machine as I am already there and just in time for the plague.