Consequences-Tale of the Burning Containers (end Mar. 2015)

In the last blog, I talked about elections and hiring people when you couldn't afford to pay them.

What are some of the consequences of doing that?  Well, other than really messing up the lives of the people working for you, here's a little story about consequences.

Color-coded containers:  olive green is for garbage.

Half a block from my apartment in Jerez de la Frontera (Spain) is a set of containers:  one for plastic recyclables, one for paper trash, one for glass recycling, and one for garbage.  (Here, you take out your own garbage;  the garbage truck comes every night to empty the big garbage container.)

There's another set of similar containers about two blocks away, etc., etc..

Yellow is for recycling plastic.  What's behind that ugly blue
wall?  A construction site where work stopped 5 years ago.

Or rather, up until a couple of days ago, this is the way it was.

But yesterday afternoon, when I went out with my bag full of paper trash, the paper trash container had disappeared!  The glass recycling container was gone as well.

Missing!  grey container for paper recycling, bright green
container (rounded at the top) for glass

...but not the garbage container or the plastic recycling container.

SO--I walked with my bulging bag of paper trash the two blocks to the other set of containers.  Both the paper trash and the glass recycling containers had disappeared!  Extraordinary!

I had to bring my bulging bag home, where it still is.

This morning, when I went out for a brief run-walk, I looked around at other places where I'd expect to find paper trash and glass recycling containers.  There were none to be found,

When a friend dropped by later on, I asked him about this.  He told me that "they" had burned them up and taken them away!

The containers two blocks away;  notice the big space
between them where the MISSING containers used to be.

I asked him what he meant.  He said he saw the paper recycling container near his house in flames, and called the police to let them know.  They gave him the brush-off.  He walked to the next paper recycling container with his paper trash, and it was on fire as well.  This time, he didn't  call the police.

In total, that day, he saw five of these containers on fire.  A little while later he saw a truck come by and pick up all the burned containers as well as the glass recycling containers.  Now, when he wants to recycle, he has to go in his car to where his sister lives, and where there are still containers.

He finished his story by explaining he assumes the recycling people burned up the containers because city hall isn't paying them.

Bad, bad, BAD city hall.  (NOTE:  the people in
uniforms are city police, chewing the fat.  It's not THEIR fault.)

_________________
Eve A. Ma is in Spain where, having completed the revised Afro-Peruvian documentary, she is getting back to work on a documentary about flamenco.  Subscribe HERE to our monthly newsletter to keep up with her work.