I went to Mexico during the winter break — flew down for 10 days of sun and fun on the Pacific Coast.
I stayed with my dad just outside a small town where all the locals smiled, waved and didn’t try to sell me anything. I spent my mornings surfing consistent rights and my afternoons reading the books that I never finished during fall term. I didn’t put shoes on once.
I ate fresh avocados and papayas as Lola, the bilingual parrot, sang love songs in the background. The air was 88 degrees and the water, 80.
It was beautiful — except for all the garbage.
In the state of Guerro, where my dad lives, most of the people can’t afford or don’t have access to garbage collection services. As a result, they take most of their trash outside and burn it in small piles about once a week. It’s a practical and cheap way to get rid of waste.
Between burning, the piles are picked over by roaming animals, scattered by the wind and spread throughout the neighborhood. The edges of the yards, which have been tenderly and careful raked, are splattered with bits of half-melted plastic and rubber.
Plastic bottles show up on the beach, not because they are washed up by the warm Pacific tide, but because they are blown off the top of trash piles into rivers headed for the sea. Styrofoam, buffeted upward by steady offshore breezes, perches in the cocos, indistinguishable from the local birds.
As much as I hate the burning of the trash, I can’t help but think that if I were in the local Mexicans’ shoes and forced to choose between paying a garbage collector to take the trash away — where it will probably also be burned — and buying food for my household, I would do exactly as they do and burn the garbage. It wouldn’t even be a choice.
Even though I know how horrible burning petroleum-based products — like plastic — are for the environment, I would think about survival first and air quality second, or third. And this can’t be right.
I came back from Mexico just before midnight on Dec. 25. I traded in my sandals for shoes and my surf trunks for fleece-lined pants. As I walked through PDX toward the car, I noticed all the sanitary little dust bins, brooms, cleaning products and garbage cans.
Two days after getting home, my dad sent an e-mail with a picture he had taken of his truck parked on the beach surrounded by dark green fifty-gallon trash bags. He stood holding one of the bags smiling into the camera.
In his e-mail he wrote, “Dear Aimee, I spent the day cleaning up the beach in front of the house. A bunch of the local kids stopped and helped me. It was awesome. I filled eight Hefty bags and could have filled eight more. Love, Dad.”
I fired back a short note.
“Dad, That’s great, but now what do you do with the filled garbage bags? Love, Aimee.”