The garbage is picked up every Wednesday and Sundays, sort of. Most Sundays but not all, and Wednesdays only if it’s not a holiday. The garbage service is unreliable, shall we say? And there are problems with leaving garbage out for pickup – dogs.
There are a lot of dogs roaming the streets and they break into whatever is left on the road. I could add that cows also attack garbage. But the main problem seems to be the dogs, and it doesn’t even matter that there’s nothing in the garbage that smells like meat, or any food at all.
In one neighborhood, I saw people hanging up their garbage bags – grocery store plastic bags are predominantly used here – on sticky-outy things on their outside walls. If we could rig a way to do that so the garbage men didn’t have to jump over the ditch, we would, but we seriously doubt they’d be willing to jump ditches just to do their jobs.
Because I hadn’t seen the equivalent of a Lankan garbage detail, I decided to take a look with camera in hand.
When they saw me at the door, one of them proceeded to yell something at me (not angry, just trying to make themselves heard over the noise of hte truck), probably about cleaning up the garbage the dogs tore into. I didn’t understand a word, and our next door neighbor said something to them, so they nodded and smiled and continued on their merry way. Neighbor then said something to me that, of course, I still didn’t understand. I smiled and nodded and generally looked stupid and went inside. Ah, well. Time to learn Sinhalese.
