Creative Reuse

Labor in Burundi may be plentiful and cheap but resources are not so when a thing gets used here, it gets used. And reused, and then used for something else until it can no longer function as any kind of useful object at which point like a dead Viking warrior, it is burned. Without the boat and arrow part.

We could learn a thing or two about resource management here. Take the ever present Fanta. There is a Fanta bottling plant right here in Bujumbura from whence comes the blessed blessed Fanta in glass bottles. When you and or your guests have consumed a case of Fanta, you bring your case of empty bottles to the store and get a discount on your next case. The bottle are washed (one assumes, and why not as there are plenty of inexpensive bottle washing humans available) and refilled and resold. So you'll get a bottle sometimes that looks like its 30 years old, and maybe it is. Even if you buy only one bottle from a street vendor, the vendor will expect the bottle back when you've finished. Really you're only buying the soda, the bottle belongs to Fanta. There also seems to be a bit of a whim factor in the kinds of Fanta which they bottle on any given day. Somedays you can only find Citron, in all of Kamenge. Sometimes there is no Sprite or only Orange and Coke. One terrible day there was no Fanta at all, of any flavor within reasonable biking distance of the clinic. And the people had to drink water, and they were sad.

Many of the caps also live long happy lives after they've been pried off the bottle. They become checkers or poker chips or stand ins for football players in a game scratched in the dirt. I've seen some flattened and used as washers.

The universal water carrying container was, in its first life, a yellow cooking oil jug.

I've already talked about what becomes of empty water bottles in the hands of children though adults too will ask us for our empties. I assume they want them for the more prosaic purpose of carrying water.

On the bus sometimes the metal piece which is welded onto the single seats to act as a rest for the flip down seat is covered with a small car oil bottle (like a Penziol bottle, but not that brand) to protect the passenger's ankles from jagged welds.

I saw another kite today, this one quite successful made from a black plastic bag torn into a diamond shape and stretched onto a T frame made of who knows what. Again the string was made from tied together bits. It flew high enough for us to see it from a block away on the walk home from lunch. It got caught on a power line and we washed the boy who was flying it try to coax it back into the air. The carcasses of 2 similar kites, draped over the same line spoke of this being an ancient struggle.

At the workcamp site they've been using the same pieces of of wood and board maybe since the construction started 2 years ago. The boards that create the channels guiding the cement around the rebar cages are carefully pulled apart once the cement has dried, nails saved and hammered straight and then all are used again to make the staging for getting at the upper levels of the walls. A word about this staging. It would not be OSHA approved. Tree limbs with one nail make one cross piece, another two with another precious nail make another. The short ends rests on top of the wall and 2 boards are laid across them. They bow and bend as we pile bricks, mortar and masons on them. We reuse the bags the cement comes in to carry cement and the mud mortar. Nothing gets wasted. We had a sad moment yesterday when at last the oldest, dullest, most worn pair of wire cutters I've ever seen, wire cutters so done with life even the Lookingglass scene shop would have told them they could retire, they died in the trenches when the head snapped off. Then and only then was a new (used) pair of wire cutters purchased. I wonder what has to happen before they decide to buy a new bucket? The current already has a hole in the bottom so it can only be used to carry thick things like mud and cement. For water we use a separate, sacred, only to be used for water bucket. At night, anything which might develop legs and walk away including the old oil drum we use as a water cistern gets moved into the back room of the clinic and locked up.

When one of the desks in the HROC office split apart, an event any American would look upon as a sign it was time to buy a new desk, a carpenter was called in and over the course of 2 days he repaired the split and restained the desk top. I'm telling you, if something gets thrown away here, it really must be trash.

And speaking of trash. I will also say that there's an attitude toward trash here which would have entire tribes of American Indians crying rivers. Anywhere outside, anything designated as trash is mostly just dropped on the ground. There's not really anywhere else for it to go. Then when it reaches whatever critical mass is necessary to designate it a 'pile' sooner or later, someone will set it on fire. Prior to that moment, however, one steps over a lot of trash in the street. Little bits of wrappers of things and small pieces of paper and toothpicks and plastic bags that have not yet been salvaged into kites. Or bags that have already been through their bag stage, their keeping capati warm while the rest are being cooked stage, their kite stage and are in their post entanglement with power line stage. You know, the one that comes right before the being set on fire stage.