Here There and Everywhere

Expat wanderer

Kuwait: Making a Difference

I want to share with you a comment on my environment day post from one of our local bloggers, NicoleB / Rainmountain. She is a professional photographer, and describes below her one-woman (successful!) effort to clean up, and keep clean, the Mangaf beach. Brava, Rainmountain! Because of her example, others are taking their own trash to the trash cans, rather than leaving it, the trash collectors are encouraged, and working harder, and the beach is visibly cleaner. Brava! Brava!

Here is her comment from my environmental blog day post:

I’ve started cleaning our small beach here in Mangaf and now, half a year later, it’s almost clean at any time.

The trash guys are doing more and some people seemed to have picked up and do some cleaning too.

Sad part is to come down there and see that someone had a party and left all their stuff there.
So, you just go and start all over again.

It makes me sometimes wonder if people a) have no common sense and b) no pride in their country.

I had various weird conversations about this topic.
Here’s a copy from my blog of one of them:

Man: Excuse me, do you speak English?
Me: Yes?!
Man: What are you doing there?
Me: Collecting trash….?!
Man: Why are you doing that? They (pointing at that poor guy still waiting) do THAT.
Me: And the beach is still dirty….
Man: But that is the way it is.
Me: No. It’s not.
Man: Since when are you here?
Me: Six weeks and since then the beach is much cleaner, don’t you think?
Man: How do you like it here?
Me: It’s beautiful, if everyone would pick up his trash.

End of conversation. It seems he didn’t know what to answer, or thought it would be useless, but maybe he got the idea

December 9, 2007 Posted by | Community, Experiment, Family Issues, Hygiene, Kuwait, Leadership, Local Lore, Spiritual | , , | 10 Comments