Cruising away from Meru town the matatu that I was in followed a dump truck full of garbage for about a kilometer. The truck has just been loaded up with garbage from the town and was piled high.
It might be hard to imagine how much garbage there is spread around public areas in Kenya, but a few months back they removed something like 50 tons from a creek running through Nairobi. Meru is as dirty as Nairobi and I applaud the efforts that these people had made in removing garbage.
Most of this garbage is in the form of small plastic bags, due to their ubiquity in Kenyan markets. Each time you buy an orange, a drink, biscuits, or tomatoes, the purchased object is put into a bag, which is instantly discarded by the buyer.
This dump truck was not tarped and at 80 km/hr these bags were forming a perpetual cloud above the bed of the truck. Hundreds of the bags in this cloud would lose equilibrium and would shoot out to the sides of the truck, gently falling to the ground on either side of the road. Simultaneously more bags would be dislodged from the ever decreasing pile in the truck bed.
Maybe this garbage truck is not actually headed for a specific dump site; maybe the journey is the end of the line and the goal is to redistribute all of the manufactured goods that had converged on the city.
Maybe they were trying to make the statement that what they were doing to the forest is what all of us are doing to the forests, or, more likely, they just don't care.
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