Easter Hunt

Over the last week and a half I helped children in my neighboring communities usher in spring with a bit of a hunt. An egg hunt, no. It was a trash hunt. Turns out that kids don’t care what they’re hunting for as long as they get to run around outside wearing bags on their hands. Our little community clean-ups were fun for the little kids but presented a larger dilemma for the older, more advanced students.

The older students stated that they do not like the presence of litter in their communities. It is ugly. Broken glass cuts people’s feet. Goats get sick by ingesting the trash. Mosquitoes breed in abandoned containers. Discarded cigarette butts can cause forest fires. But, is it possible to solve the problem of community litter?

One class quickly gave me the answer they thought I wanted to hear when I posed that question. “We can pick up existing trash, and each of us can stop littering from today forward. We can speak with others in the community about it as well,” they said.
Gold star.

Another class was less optimistic. The students thought that trash pick-ups were a great idea a few times a year, but they couldn’t fathom the idea that each one of them could stop littering. To me, it seemed like such a simple request. Just put your candy wrapper in the trash can!

But the problem goes beyond that. The problem is linked to challenging logistics for municipal waste management, a scarcity of trash receptacles for the community, strong winds that carry your trash away the moment you try to put it in its proper place. The problem of litter also relates to cultural norms. In America when you cook, you place each wrapper, each garlic skin, each potato peel in a waste basket destined for the curb or the compost bin. In Cape Verde, you throw all those things on the ground in the kitchen. When you’re done preparing the meal, you sweep them up. Since I’ve gotten used to it, I’ve realized that it’s a rather convenient routine.

Since people here are accustomed to tossing trash on the ground and sweeping afterwards, asking people to carry trash in their hand until reaching a trash can seems unnatural. It’s a bit like me asking you to sleep with your shoes on. It’s uncomfortable and unnecessary and just plain odd. You’d most likely take those shoes off before laying down just out of habit.

The method of encouraging change that I attempted with the students was simply to present them with information and images of the larger picture. Trash is not just a problem in our Cape Verdean community – it is a world-wide problem. While Cape Verdeans may be struggling with litter, Americans are struggling with wastefulness, over-consumption, and overflowing landfills. A Cape Verdean may throw a plastic bag on the ground, but it will only be after they’ve used it 20 times and it finally ripped.

In the end, and on either side of the ocean, the bigger problem is one of behavior change. What works? How can a community change the behavior of its members when the odds are so heavily stacked against them? I guess the answer would serve as a solution to a great many problems.


So, that’s my Earth Day soap box. I’ll step down now.
Relax and enjoy spring-inspired photos of baby animals. Awww.

One Is the Loneliest Number?

As a former napper during the Oprah show, I managed to pick up a few tidbits of advice for ensuring my emotional well-being. One such pearl of wisdom is that spending time alone is necessary for maintaining a healthy life balance. Slipping away for “me time” is necessary to “recharge my batteries.” Oprah, the national expert on mental health and make-overs, told me that being around other people is draining and something that I need to regularly take a break from.

This is not a point of view commonly held in Cape Verdean culture. People here spend their time in more constant and closer physical proximity to others than Americans are accustomed to. Folks in my community have grown up as part of large families in small dwellings and generally seem to feel most comfortable being surrounded by people. They rarely participate in solitary activities. They handle chores together, cook together, sleep together, bathe together, and congregate in common places to sit next to one another- sometimes without saying a word.

With so much emphasis on togetherness, my Cape Verdean neighbors were perplexed by my willingness to spend some time alone while Scott was on a trip last week. Knowing that my husband was out of town for several days, my neighbors seemed to take shifts making sure that I would not get lonely. They were genuinely concerned that I would feel sad and afraid- especially at night. Multiple families offered to loan me a child for the week so that I would have someone to sleep with. Since my friends here find that sleeping in a bed alone is a sort of punishment- perhaps something that they’ve never done once in their lives, they couldn’t fathom that I actually enjoy the luxury of a whole bed to myself.

What could have been a lonely (or healthy “alone time”) week, turned into a bit of a social marathon. I am grateful for all the meals, shared cups of coffee, and conversation. I am now also grateful to have my husband home, ironically, so that I can spend a little time to myself.

Scott’s trip to the capital was part of an exciting development. He was invited to participate in an “Inception Workshop” with United Nations representatives and members of the Cape Verdean Ministry of Environment in order to take steps in developing five new national parks. This is the project that Scott was initially assigned to, and he is hopeful that he will be able to assist with technical expertise. He’s also hoping that his work load will pick up.


A couple more high points since I last posted:

1. Our chicks have hatched! We currently have 7 tiny, squeaking balls of fluff running around the coop.

2. We borrowed a video projector and hosted a film night for our community on Saturday. There are no movie theaters on our island or the next, so it was quite a social event. Over 100 children and adults packed into a room roughly the size of my mother’s living room to watch a nature film. It was narrated in a foreign language, but no one cared since they were all too busy giving their own commentaries to hear the words of the announcer. It is refreshing to know that certain images are universally entertaining: mating lizards, jumping gazelles, a chameleon catching flies with its tongue, and a baby monkey clinging to its mother’s back. When the baby monkey struggled to lower itself from a tree branch, the group yelled, “Forza, amiguinho!” “Strength, buddy!” Watching a movie with a screaming crowd of people has never been such fun.