“Crunch”

The Balboa beer can flattens under my foot, and I scoop it into a plastic bag with the other aluminium pancakes. I scan the streetside for my next targets. Cans go in one bag, everthing else – plastic bottles, styrofoam cups, candy bar wrappers – goes in another. I fill them both over my one-hour shift.

Mondays, at 7am, El Valle’s “Green team” meets in front of the Hong Kong ferreteria. The hardware store serves as the gathering point for a small group of locals and gringos who fan out on foot, in golf carts, and trucks for a power hour of basic garbage collection, toting bags and hand-held pickers. The trash is taken to the municipal waste dump.

There is a sisphean satisfaction in doing menial work as the Calle Principal comes to life. Uniformed kids lining up in their school courtyard, safety-vested labourers starting road work, trucks and buses slowing for the speed bumps. Stray dogs dozing, shops opening. Nothing really disgusting to report yet. The sickly-sweet rotting mangos under their tree – is it garbage? – I leave.

El Valle does collect waste, just not off the ground at public roadsides. I’m told it was way worse before locals decided to do something about it. Now, progressively, people here are learning to hang on to their trash just a little longer until they can find a proper receptacle. I can’t count this modest effort as planet-saving. But for me it is doing what you can, where you are, with what you’ve got.