Garbage collection on the isthmus

 Forecast: 87°/77° with thundershowers possible in the afternoon; 

Humidity:  91%

Sunrise 6:06 am., Sunset 5:57 p.m.

I am kind of fascinated by trash and garbage --- back home, I'm constantly trying to find ways to reduce the amount of trash I produce, for example --- and so figuring out how garbage works here in a completely different country is obviously something I've been paying attention to.  

One of the most striking and obvious aspects of trash collection here are the garbage cages you see in front of many house. 

A garbage cage on a stand.

A different style of garbage cage on a stand.

A garbage hut, on the ground.

No cage, but a garbage can with a lid held in place by
 large rocks hanging from ropes.

A garbage can closet, with no gate.

A garbage hut with a gate.

And sometimes, plain old garbage cans
like you'd see back in Pennsylvania.

There's a raccoon-like creature here, the "gato solo" (coati mundi?) that people point to as the reason for these trash cages; these animals do love digging into trash.  It's not clear that these cages are remotely effective at deterring gato solos, though.  In fact, I've heard lots of stories of gato solos eating from these cages, and I've even seen it with my own eyes.  Some of the garbage huts look like they're helpful for protecting an open bin from filling up during the many torrential rains we get here, and the off-the-ground cages maybe help protect from pests?  But I'm really not sure what the actual reason for the garbage cages is.

A family of gato solos grazing by the side of the road.

You can see from the above pictures that there's no curbside recycling here in Panama. There are places that accept recycling -- including the Ciudad del Saber, where my host office is.  

A bunch of upside-down recycling bins
waiting near an outdoor meeting area.

Inside my building, from right to left:  paper and cardboard,
plastic and glass, cans, and "todo lo demas" (all the rest).

Many of the people I've met take their recycling to the Ciudad del Saber or other drop-off centers.  Having said that, I know that the people that I talk to are not representative of the larger population.  Some neighborhoods (like mine) are rather meticulously kept from trash, but others . . . well, there are a lot of places where trash is part of the landscape.   Thanks to all the rain here, trash is also very much part of the riverscape, too.

During our pre-departure Fulbright Orientation, one piece of insight from a former Fulbright that reminded me a LOT of my trip to Haiti was this: "In the U.S., we hide our trash, which now feels dishonest to me." In the country he visited (and in many places in the developing world), trash is out in the open.  To us, it might feel "dirty", but he reminded us that it's also a chance to reexamine our cultural assumptions about our own garbage production.

Back to trash collection.  I haven't quite been able to figure out if there's a set schedule for garbage collection; a friend who lives in the countryside here says despite all her time here, she's similarly uncertain.  I've seen two different methods for collecting garbage bags in our neighborhood.

The men on the left toss the garbage bags into the front loader,
which every once in a while dumps its load into the dump truck.

A garbage truck more like the ones in Pennsylvania.
Imagine being dressed head-to-to like that in 85+ degree weather!

In my own efforts to reduce the amount of garbage that needs to go to the landfill, figuring out how to compost goes high on the list: not only do the food scraps I compost not go to the landfill, but also they don't sit in my kitchen smelling bad and causing us to empty our trash can more often, using more trash bags (that's what happened when we first got here).

So I've been keeping banana peels and other food scraps in a little bag in the freezer, and every once in a while I walk this bag to the end of the street where there are some woods, and I empty the bag into a little hole in the ground that looks like an animal burrow.

The hole in the ground.

The end of the street.  The backdoor (always locked)
to the U.S. Embassy is on the right; my compost spot is to the left.
Oh, and there's a couple of trash huts visible in this photo, too.

I leave my food scraps there on the ground, hidden from the street, and they're usually gone a day later.  I was feeling a little bit like a food-waste felon, dumping my stuff on the ground like this, . . . and then one day my AirBnB host walked past me on the patio with a plate full of food scraps and told me she was taking it down to the river.  I immediately jumped up and joined her as she showed me the way she walks through a gate at the back of the house, down a grassy hill, to the trees and brush bordering the river.  She lay the food scraps on the ground like an offering to the river gods---or maybe better said, to the river-side animal gods---and told me that when she does this, the food scraps always disappear within a day.  So now I don't feel like such a counter-cultural oddball when I offer up my fruit rinds and chicken bones to the underground creature I share this neighborhood with.