This is How We Do It: Taking Out the Trash

Things are different in Tanzania. OF COURSE. I knew this. Before moving here, though, this was only a vague notion, an obvious statement people made when they were jokingly trying to assess just how serious I was about moving eight-to-eleven time zones away. I didn't know the myriad little things that add up in contrast to the life I knew before moving here. And chances are, you probably don't, either.

So, I'll be doing a series of posts titled, "This is How We Do It," intended to give you a more concrete idea of how life here is a little different. And now, Part One!

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It feels as though every day here is an adventure, and certainly the adventure in my first two weeks was just figuring out the basics of my new life. Basics like...taking out the trash.

In America, taking out the trash is a 30-second annoyance. Pull the strings on a still-fairly-clean white plastic bag, heft it out of the fairly-clean white plastic bin you bought at Target, walk through the garage and dump! Drag the can to the end of the street once a week, and the trash inside magically disappears by the time you get home from work. Rinse, repeat.

My first "taking out the trash " experience in Tanzania took two days of talking about it with Stephanie, one more day of stalling, and then half the morning the following day to actually accomplish our task.

We lugged the 15 kilo trash can from the guesthouse to the burn pit, taking a more=direct but also more-treacherous route up a walkway, down a hill with knee-high grasses (and probably snakes), over a cement ledge, and down a dirt path.

And then, all we had to do was burn it. With really cheap matches that are difficult to light. On a windy day.

Needless to say, after 37 failed attempts to light the pile, we "outsourced" our chore to Jonas, who is always willing to help a damsel in distress. He miraculously got the fire started, and we watched it for about 30 minutes until it burned out, having only consumed about half the pile. Another box of matches later, I couldn't get it lit again. There's always tomorrow.

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On our second trash outing, Stephanie and I had learned our lesson, so we hired an "assistant" from the very beginning.

Paul followed us down to the burn pit and effortlessly lit the trash pile. He is a CHAMPION! (Also, he got freshly baked chocolate chip cookies for his efforts.)

We basked in the glow of of his success. With Lake Victoria in the background, I like to pretend it's a beach bonfire. With a discarded toilet in it.