Cleaning house is a traditional Christmas to-do here in Tobago. While commendable practice, the wider effect - on the general population, is anything but. This year things peaked. The head of the Tobago House of Assembly the Honourable Chief Secretary Farley Augustine announced a day out of office. Something to the effect that all THA Divisions will participate in an island-wide clean-up.
What happened afterwards is historic. In the sense that everyone with an old appliance, dirty mattress and/or scads of garbage bags, animal feed bags (and what have you) tossed things on the island’s roads - for the THA to pick up. This mind you, is occurring in the period when most everyone is in holiday mode. A bit on that.
[Above: The Case of the Disappeared Christmas Waste]
Re: Above. No. The garbage truck did not pick up those old fridges and stoves. Follow the backhoe tracks down the gully. Why the willingness to forgive this blatant act of environmental vandalism? Tobago is largely god-fearing so Christmas means food, fete and fun. Lots. Naturally the staff of the THA did not show up in their numbers to collect an dispose of the public’s waste. Why should they? What we want to take home this Christmas then boils down to this.
Big clean-up drives should occur in the [tourism] low season. Christmas or no, discarded appliances have no place lying in your backyard until some well-placed official announces a freebie trash pick-up at the States’ expense. Rather, the THA might want to do their job and stay with a perpetual program to sensitise people to the importance of managing ‘own waste’.
The big picture improves should THA Secretary types grasp the importance of enablement - As opposed to spoon-feeding. Imagine a Tobago where people pay small trucking services to dispose of their white waste. Imagine the entrepreneurial growth, as young men and women can fund their transport requirements with a small van that can earn money going to the landfill (yes, steel is dumped in Tobago).
[Above: LOGOS Volunteers cleaning up a Tobago beach during the vessel’s Dec 2024 visit]
We can go on and on about this but there is a takehome. Christmas is not the time for rubbish to be displayed on Tobago’s streets. All it does is lead to some fortunate son getting a contract poste-haste to shove the waste into the nearest gully. The Divisional head who doesn’t get this is out of touch with the real world.