For the third year in a row, we headed to Ebeye today to kick off our 4-H Ebeye Citizenship Club with a school campus clean up or "Trash Bash." Trash or "Kobej" in Marshallese is handled much differently in the islands than we are used to in the United States. Around every corner and at every store, home, and at every movie theater or fast food restaurant, trash receptacles abound in America. This is not the case on the tiny island of Ebeye, less than 5 miles from the US Army base of Kwajalein atoll. When you do encounter a trash can, it is usually one of the largish bins that the trash trucks picks up on their weekly runs, and they are almost always overflowing, and if not, you can be sure to get a face full of flies when you open it to deposit your trash.
Food trash in the islands way back when was always biodegradable in the form of coconuts, breadfruit, bananas, fish, and palm frond plates to eat it on. There were no such things as utensils because you ate with your hands, and there was not the abundance of plastic wrapping on processed food, toys, and everyday "luxury" items we use in the states because there was no place to buy these things and no need for them. Then, Asian and Western cultures "discovered" and named the Marshalls and brought in sacks of rice, cans of soda pop, and the commerce of "civilization." This has in turn brought on a very high incidence of diabetes, a dependence on imports to feed the pollution instead of eating the local "hunter-gatherer" foods, and unfortunately "civilized trash."
Even though Ebeye has been exposed to this type of modern lifestyle for decades now, throwing trash in a garbage can, recycling, reusing, and reducing waste has not be taught or passed on to upcoming generations as an important part of adopting the "civilized ways" of the world. They never needed a trash can before. You could just throw it on the ground, and it would become part of the earth once again, and that way of thinking can still be seen when the children from the club last year picked up trash with us for an hour, then promptly threw their lollipop wrappers we distributed as a treat for their hard work right back on the ground they just cleaned up. Amazing! You don't realize how much your parents and society teach and ingrain in us as Americans until you see this type of behavior and realize that you just grew up knowing that you had to throw trash away, and there was always a trash can available to do so because it's part of our "culture." My boys have been taught to throw garbage in the trash since they were babies, and even today, if they cannot find a trash can, they will ask me what to do with their trash; whereas, a Marshallese child would simply throw it on the ground. As a result, most of the trash we picked up around the school today was plastic containers and Styrofoam cups from the kids' catered lunches. They sit outside on the concrete porch in front of their classroom and eat, then toss the trash on the ground. We found three bags of trash that someone has actually taken the time to put in the bags, but then they never tied them up or took them to the larger bins to be picked up, so the garbage had spilled back out and maggots were covering it.
So, today we talked about citizenship which entails three things as far as our club is concerned and that's "being good neighbors," "protecting the environment," and "making our schools and communities better," and we will hold activities monthly on Kwajalein and Ebeye to get to know each other, share our cultures and traditions, and improve our schools and communities by doing things like the clean-up. Before going outside, we talked about these things, then had some snacks and read a book called, "The Great Trash Bash" to emphasize why it is important to pick up our trash, and afterwards, we got back on the boat to Kwaj, to our clean, Americanized atoll in the middle of the Pacific. I realize cleaning up once a year as part of the club doesn't instill a permanent mind set change in the Marshallese. It doesn't solve the pollution problem, but even doing just this little bit makes a big difference. The campus looked so much nicer when we were through, and if helping out every now and again can eventually lead others to do the same and more often, we accomplished our purpose of being good neighbors and helping protect the environment. After all, as Americans, we are learning from our mistakes concerning pollution and trash as we speak, and we simply want to help teach the Marshall Islands how not to make our same mistakes down the road.
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