Plastic Plastic Everywhere and not a...

Hi Folks.  Your friendly neighborhood Peace Corps volunteer here with a little itty bitty tiny question about just a wee little problem with some plastic...

This is a dump.  In and of itself not so bad, there are lots of dumps in the world.  You see the problem lies in the dump's location... right next to the delta... on a slope... that drains into the mangroves in the rainy season.  In the dry season it does this:

The Sahel gets kind of... windy... and the trash blows oh so beautifully all over fields and then out into the delta.  This is when it isn't just burned that is.  The entire pile is periodically burned and then restarted.  There are small piles of burned plastic all over the area along with aluminum cans, broken glass, and plenty of rotting organic matter as well.  Sigh...

I wish I could say that this is unique, but this is a fairly small site.  The larger cities do the same thing, only they are more efficient at burning it in massive piles that create terrible toxins.  So plastic is kind of a problem here.

This situation is particularly unconscionable here though because the source of all this trash comes from the hotels in Toubacouta.  One hotel is willing to work with us on the problem, the other threw a group of 20 some odd PCV's out on New Years Eve because we weren't the "right" kind of people and didn't speak French.  Don't worry lonely planet has been contacted.  

You're probably thinking that my question is what should I do about this problem.  Sadly no.  There are so many cooks in that kitchen already.  No my question is what do you do when none of the ideal solutions are possible and leaving the problem alone is abhorrent (abhorrent, unconscionable my vocab is on fire today).  At this point in my service I just don't have time to start a massive behavior change program to reduce plastic consumption and the hotels and the population aren't enthusiastic anyways.  The previous volunteer in my site tried a waste management project and the village just stole her materials and used them for other things and then continued littering everywhere and burning everything.  The non ideal solution is plastic incinerators which I've recently been told by several people are in fact much worse then just leaving the plastic where it is.  I've been told the opposite as well.  Everyone has their point of view and their personal priorities and agendas, not least of which the Senegalese people who quite frankly don't give a damn when they aren't food secure or would rather be making tea.  I don't even know if it should be one of my priorities when I could be working on any number of things from pumps, to improved gardening, to health, to Female Genital Cutting, all of which are problems in my village.  I just don't know (someone should go back and count how many times I've said that in blog posts throughout my service).  

Then again if we could start a program that used a somewhat cleaner incinerator (cleaner than burning on the ground) and combined it with composting the organic material and then selling it, we could at least start the process of people putting waste into a system instead of throwing it on the ground and forgetting about it.  That's the first step.  That would be at least something, and something that didn't have plastic flowing into the ocean.  Sure it's a higher impact being put on the world at large to protect this one area, but maybe the delta is worth it.  Of course there are a million problems associated with it and its very possible that I'm just being lazy and I'm too scared to try to do the right thing becuase its hard and I've lost my idealism.  Who knows.  I feel like a trauma surgeon with my patient bleeding out and only a butter knife and a dirty oil rag to fix it.

Plastic plastic everywhere and not a thing to do about it...