Nairobi—The Dandora Municipal Dumping Site is a heap of world-class toxicity festering on the east edge of Nairobi. Formerly a rock quarry, it became the city’s domestic, medical, and industrial waste basket in 1973; it filled up by the late eighties and has been overflowing ever since, these days at the rate of 2,000 tonnes of unfiltered garbage a day.
The only checks on its growth are the fires that convert a small portion into acrid smoke, and the legions who scavenge off it for a living. About a million people live within sight or smell of the dump site. They have formed a separate economy based on recycling other people’s garbage. The dark irony is that the source of their livelihoods is poisoning them to death.
A visiting army of journalists was recently mobilized by the UN Environment Programme, whose headquarters are just a short drive away. Photo opportunities, a new study revealing “the first scientific evidence” of what everyone already knew, some well-turned quotes from UNEP’s executive director — “UNEP is today putting the spotlight of international attention on the dumpsite in Dandora” — all these and more awaited us.
The local reporters who turned up were outnumbered by their foreign counterparts. Reuters, the BBC, Voice of America, and the like keep plenty of staff in Nairobi for just this kind of event. All told, we filled three buses.
As our convey wove through the crowded slums surrounding the dump, it became clear that we were at least as interesting to our subjects as they were to us. We eyed each other warily through the windows, both groups recognizing in the other an opportunity for profit.
A security detail awaited us at the drop-off. They led us past a bemused young woman hanging her laundry on a clothesline, down to the smoldering garbage heap’s edge. The Nairobi River lay between us and it. Twenty feet wide and choked with refuse, the river absorbs Dandora’s poisons on its way through the city where Nairobi’s homeless use it to wash in.
We scattered to take pictures and chat with the dozens of children who had swarmed us. What do you think of the garbage? we asked them. Why aren’t you in school? Where are your parents?
Two kids were spotted sorting garbage nearby. One, a young boy with his pants rolled up to his knees, stood barefoot in the river, washing plastic bags in an eddie. He threw the cleaned bags to his companion, a girl in her late teens, who sorted and tied them together. She was accosted by a Kenyan television crew. They set up the angles while she gazed at her feet, answering their questions in a shy whisper, smiling at the attention.
When I squatted on a rock near the boy, he looked at me quickly then bent to pick a scab on his shin. Andrew Ouma, he said, twelve years old. He spoke not to me but to one of the many children crowding around us. Andrew Ouma concentrated on his shins and whispered into my new interpreter’s ear: he went to school each morning, and came here in the afternoons to collect and wash plastic bags. He made thirty cents a kilo. He was happy.
By now Andrew had picked the scab off his shin and was scooping grey water over it to wash away the blood. What did he want to be when he grew up? A shopkeeper. What would he sell? He wasn’t sure. Matches, maybe.
A German crew hurried over. Their announcer, her grey hair tied back in a severe ponytail, was confused by all the identically scruffy boys and girls. “Who is washing the plastic?” She pointed the children impatiently. “Can you wash some plastic?” Blank stares in return. She switched to German. “Let’s go talk to the fat girl.”
Later at the wrap-up press conference we heard the results of UNEP’s study. Half the children living here have chronic respiratory infections, and the same proportion show symptoms of heavy metal poisoning: low hemoglobin counts, iron deficiencies, cancers. Lead, mercury and cadmium are ten to fifty times more concentrated in Dandora soil than in control samples taken from the other side of Nairobi.
Different messages went home that day. Local journalists were primarily interested in city council’s latest plan of action, which was to bury the dump and find a new one. Foreigners took advantage of the human interest angle, marveling at the resilience and ingenuity of the garbage people. UNEP’s own pitch was simply that the citizens of Dandora deserve a better life, and we all share a duty in providing it.
But the most instinctive reaction, the one we all agreed on, was the one we couldn’t publish: Thank god we don’t live here. And of course, that’s just the point — if the world’s Dandoras are allowed to keep growing, eventually all of us will.
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