IT’S late March and the children in the Senior Infants class under the watchful eye of teacher Dearbhla McMahon at St Thomas’s Junior National School in Jobstown, Tallaght, are combining the school’s recycling efforts, aimed at securing a second
‘Green Flag’, with a project on Madagascar, an island the size of France with a population of 22 million.
For their one-page presentation, Craig wrote about lemurs, Katie about a small country, Taylor about a country near Africa, Hannah about watching the film
‘Madagascar’ and Elena about children recycling on dumps.
Across the city, children in the first-year class at Cabra Community College, Kilkiernan Road, Cabra West, were also engaged in recycling, in an effort to secure a first
‘Green Flag’. They were similarly combining their recycling efforts with a project on Madagascar.
In the foyer of the College the fruits of their endeavours were on show, with a model display of a castle, made from recycled egg-cartons, coupled with a background collage of images of the flora and fauna of Madagascar, complete with an eagle and baobab trees.
Opposite was a second display, featuring history, information and statistics relating to Madagascar. The efforts were a cross-curricular enterprise and the body of work a proud testament of the efforts of the children and staff, led by Principal Kathy Jones.
It is now a month later and we are 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.
Here we meet four young lads waiting for the garbage trucks to arrive, Rolande and Feno, both 16, and Nore and Mbinina, both 14; they have all finished primary school. They search for metal and sell it 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 7am 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).
The dump and its surrounding area is a huge money-earner, by local standards, for those living on or near it. The 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 the two schools in Dublin, who recycle both to attain a
‘Green Flag’ and to achieve specific targets (for example the reduction by 25 per cent of school landfill waste at St Thomas’s), the people in La Dique recycle to eat – just to survive.
A community of 500 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 close proximity to the area.
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 500 Ariary 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 out of a piece of a plastic bag.
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 40-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 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 500 Ariary one way per person. She makes 2,000 Ariary (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 (pronounced deeth) 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 then sell on a daily basis to the Vitaplast factory.
She doesn’t collect the plastic herself – she buys it off other collectors and pays them 200 Ariary per kilo for it; she sells it for 400 Ariary per kilo; they manage to recycle 200 kilograms every two weeks so their net income is 40,000 Ariary (e13) 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).
While Dety specialises in white plastic her immediate neighbour on the dump, Solo, specialises in recycling black plastic, and on our visit was washing black plastic with his sons Dieu Donné and Bote, aged 16 and 19, both well-dressed and healthy-looking.
He recycles six days a week and stated that he was a Catholic with six children, three boys and three girls, ranging in age from seven to 19; all the children 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 said that all his children attend private school and that he made as much as a school-teacher would earn.
It became evident that everyone seemed to specialise in a specific item, be it plastic bottle tops (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 50 Ariary each. Others walked into the dump with litre bottles of diluted fruit juice, again for sale to the workers on the dump.
?¢ Bernard and Marie Neary arrived back in Ireland in late June after three months volunteering in Madagascar. Their trip was entirely self-funded. Photographer Paul Kelly spent one week in Madagascar, capturing in film the daily life of the recyclers. His trip was funded by the Robert and Kezia Stanley Chapman Trust.