Anti-Littering: The Middle Child of Dhaka’s Development
In popular culture, the middle child wants to shine and show their parents that they are something special. But the parents have already given too much love to their first child, literacy; and they are too enamored by their youngest child, female empowerment, to care about Anti-littering, the sad middle child of the parents of Dhaka’s development. The parents are us.
Now this is just a loose analogy that holds no regard to the chronological order to when we started to tackle the issues of littering, illiteracy and gender rights. And that is not to say that gender rights and illiteracy are less important than littering. Because they are extremely important, maybe more than littering. But that is why Anti-Littering is the middle child. We simply do not care about it as much as we do about the others. But it is still a very important thing that we must care about.
We have seen countless Anti-Littering campaigns in Bangladesh, each more creative and more theoretically impactful than the last. But in the end, every single time. We stop caring about each attempt to reduce littering as soon as it starts. We lost faith immediately and go on without littering ways.
Littering is the number one reason that stops us from calling the glorious cultural hodgepodge known as Dhaka city, beautiful. Every time we say “Dhaka City is beautiful” we taste the image in this post a little whenever the words come out of our mouths. Our calls to calling Dhaka beautiful always leaves an aftertaste of rotten jackfruits and other unbearable odors. We are reminded of the ridiculously rusted garbage bins overflowing with garbage that surrounds it. Most times, the rubbish around the bin usually outweighs the rubbish actually inside the bin.
Is there not enough bins to accommodate our trash? Or maybe it is not well kept enough?
I think this is because we leave our trash in the wrong places every time. Every single Coca Cola bottle that we throw on the street contributes to the depreciation of our city’s otherwise good looks that not even the most optimistic of romantics can find something beautiful about it.
If we ourselves let our trash out wherever we want, how do we expect others to do the same? If I throw my cigarette packets out on the side of the street. How am I to blame for the restora employee who will pour all of their dirty water in the middle of the street? The garbage cleaners will just leave the thrash on the garbage tank’s sides because the smell is too unbearable. How can we blame them if we aren’t even going to bother with the smallest degree of those offenses?
We need to prove as an example to the people around us in Dhaka city to influence the other Dhakaites to follow on our footsteps. We should be more vocal about it so that everyone around us follows the right path.
If we try to keep our city clean, then maybe others will want to do it too. But they will not know about our actions if we don’t shout it out to everyone. So start instagramming yourself throwing trash in the bin and turn on Facebook Live to stream your experience of picking up the trash someone else left on the side of the street.
If you’re in the school or university cafeteria, don’t let the helpers take out the trash for you. Show them that you are among them in their effort to keep the place where we all gather clean.