19.09.2014
Recycling for Survival in Madagascar
Castleknock parishioner, Bernard Neary and his Marie spent three months volunteering in Madagascar, arriving back in Ireland in late June. Their trip was entirely self–funded. For the past three years they have volunteered in a children’s home (Akany Avoko) there. Here, Bernard writes about their experiences when visiting a municipal dump in the Amboihabao district.
Photographer, Paul Kelly spent one week in Madagascar, capturing the daily life of the recyclers; his trip was funded by the Robert and Kezia Stanley Chapman Trust. The resultant body of work can be viewed during this month in his photographic exhibition “The Gleaners of La Digue” in St Michan’s, Church Street, Dublin 7.
At the entry to the municipal dump for Amboihabao district, situated on the banks of the Ikopa River, which runs through Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, we meet four young lads waiting for the refuse trucks to arrive, Rolande and Feno, both sixteen, and Nore and Mbinina, both 14, who have all finished primary school. They search for waste metal which they sell in the city, earning between 500 and 1,000 Ariary per day (17 to 34 cent); they keep some money for clothes and give the rest to their mothers. They start at 7 am and finish after the last truck has delivered its cargo, and don’t work on Sundays as they go to church. In any event there are no refuse deliveries on Sundays, a fact of life lamented by those who also work the dump on the Sabbath day.
The dump and its surrounding area is a huge money–earner, by local standards, for those living on or near it, as there are few or precious little formal jobs being created by the economy. The nearby river is constantly worked for silt, which is sifted and left on the bank to dry before being sold for construction sand. The land opposite the dump is used for the production of mud–bricks. These two occupations provide a source of income for recyclers at times of low activity on the dump; conversely, the dump provides an income when things are quiet in the brick fields.
Unlike in the west, where we recycle in our Green Bins, the people in La Dique recyle to eat – just to survive. A community of approximately five hundred men, women and children live on the dump and work it full time; these are complemented by others (both occasional, seasonal and full–time) living in poverty and in proximity to the dump.
A stone’s throw from the village in the centre of the dump we came across Helen, who was collecting charcoal from the embers of a smouldering waste patch. Earning just Ariary 500 per day for her labours, she said that she supported two daughters, in year 3 and year 4 at Secondary school. She had just one shoe on her, stating that she was “keeping her eye out for a shoe for the other foot”. Shortly afterwards we passed three children, who found some mouldy chewing gum and were eating it on the spot out of a piece of plastic wrapping.
A surprising feature of life on the dump was the fact that most of the residents came from the countryside, and that there are huge differences in the income to be gleaned from recycling. A typical comparison is that relating to Flor and Dety. Flor is forty years old and has four children, aged 2, 6, 7 and 12. She collects bottle–tops, bits of metal and wire and bones. She looked and was extremely poor, and her recyclables were of an far inferior quality to that seen elsewhere. The bones she crushes and sells as fertiliser. She lives across the river and gets the ferry to the dump with her four children; it costs Ariary 100 one way per person. She makes Ariary 2,000 (68 cent) per day, with half of that going on her ferry fare. Her children don’t go to school as she cannot afford to send them. Her husband also works on the dump. They don’t go to church as they have to work on Sundays – “if we don’t work, we don’t eat”.
Dety is 31 and has four children; the two eldest, aged 7 and 11, attend school. She works with her husband of ten years, Dide, and they specialise in white plastic, which they wash and sell on a daily basis to the Vitaplast factory, which recycles it in the manufacture of plastic shoes for the home market. She doesn’t collect the plastic herself – she buys it off other collectors paying them Ariary 200 per kilo; she sells it for Ariary 400 per kilo; they manage to recycle 200 kilograms every two weeks so their net income is Ariary 40,000 (€13) per fortnight. They live in the village in the centre of the dump and like all the other villagers have no electricity (with the help of an NGO they now have a communal tap water supply, for which they pay the council a water charge).
Dety’s immediate work colleague on the dump, Solo, specialises in recycling black plastic, and on our visit was washing black plastic with h is sons Dieu Donné and Bote, aged 16 and 19, both well–dressed and healthy–looking. He recycles six days a week and had six children, three boys and three girls, ranging in age from seven to 19 years; they all go to church on Sundays. Three of his children, he said, were elsewhere on the dump collecting black plastic. Solo is originally from the countryside near Ansirabe and just lives across the water facing the dump. He stated that all his children attend private school, that he recycled full–time six days a week and that he made as much as a school–teacher each month.
Specialisation
It became evident that everyone seemed to specialise in a specific item, be it plastic bottle tops (dyed and turned into coat–hangers), metal, plastic bottles, cardboard, animal bones (for fertiliser), paper, white plastic, black plastic, timber and even the resultant compost underneath the unwanted left–overs. It also appeared that if anything edible is found, it is consumed on the spot.
It was amazing to see the economic spin–off created by the dump, for example the ferryman appears to make a reasonable living ferrying the recyclers to work (100 Ariary each way) on his flat–bottomed boat which he drags across the river by a rope tied to a metal post on either side of the river. A man with a cart sold ice–cream cones (as thin as a marker) for Ariary 50 each. Others walked into the dump with litre bottles of diluted fruit juice, again for sale to the recyclers on the dump.