Trash Management in Africa

There is very little trash management in our part of Africa. In our little town people will sometimes dig a big pit and throw trash in it, occasionally burning it in a process that produces foul toxic smoke. Once the hole is full they'll cover it with some dirt and start again elsewhere. Any trash produced while walking is simply tossed on the ground, there is no concept of littering. This applies to vehicles as well, bus passengers are notorious for simply jettisoning whatever detritus they have out the window: plastic bags, soda cans, chicken bones, corn cobs, etc. Even in large cities, most rubbish just goes onto the street where it accumulates and is blown around by the wind. There is some nominal attempt to collect trash in the most public areas, but even then its just taken to the city limits and dumped so that anyone visiting the city is usually greeted by mounds of junk when entering. We personally do not produce much trash in our site. Most of our waste is organic and goes into a compost heap near our latrine which the neighboring pigs and chickens periodically raid. As for the non-compostable items, we try to reuse as much as possible, using items such as peanut butter jars and powder milk tins for storing our dry goods, scratch paper and odd plastic for starting our charcoal fire when cooking while electricity is out, and our plastic bags as many times as possible when we make trips to the market. The old ladies hawking vegetables think this habit is so funny, but they appreciate it since they have to buy the plastic bags they usually hand out to customers. Some items though just have no additional uses for us, like old toothbrushes, the foil containers our malaria meds arrive in, toothpaste tubes, burned out light bulbs, and what not. Luckily these items are treasures to all of our little creative neighbors who raid our trash pile as soon as we throw it out, and try to make little toy cars out of the junk or simply show people what the Americans were tossing. Since most of the trash is indestructible, we occassionally recognize unique little items that once belonged to us, like an old Snickers wrapper down the street. We've even seen pieces of trash that surely belonged to the previous volunteers, like an old credit card with a large American flag on it our neighbors recently found in the market. Luckily people here have so little in general that even though most trash just ends up in the streets, they don't have that much trash to begin with, so its not a major problem, or maybe we've just become so accustomed to the omnipresence of trash that we've lost our American sensitivity to litter, so it doesn't seem to be a problem to us anymore.