It’s for the Community and Me! Joel Robbins, Sheki

Last year a college student and I created a poster that said: “Keep Sheki Beautiful. You wouldn’t throw paper and trash on your floors at home, so please don’t throw candy wrappers, garbage and cigarette papers onto the streets or into the rivers of Sheki, which is the home of all of us.” It had a couple of photos, a local mosque and a sculpture.

One day I was walking down my cobblestone street and decided to pick up some of the trash along the way. My host brother was walking the other way and saw me. He kept saying, “Yox, yox.” I kept picking things up. Later I showed my family the poster. The said they liked it, but I noticed my brother taking the trash to the river a few weeks later. The odd thing is that there is a trash pickup point down our street the opposite direction from the river. Old habits die hard.

The central library let me post the anti-litter art in its window, I gave some to my college students, and I put a version in the college’s monthly newsletter. I also taped some on the stonework of bridges where people throw their trash into the rivers, but I noticed someone quickly torn them loose and discarded them.

One Sunday I went to the park between my house and the college and spent and hour picking up paper trash and burning it. That mystified some of the locals walking through the park. One child came and helped me a little while, and the female gatekeeper at the college happened to walk by and said in English, “Thank you.” I’m sure the word got around that the crazy American teacher was picking up trash instead of tossing it onto the ground.

A couple of months later, two teachers took their students into the park with weed broom/rakes and cleaned up and burned leaves and paper. I took pictures and a student wrote a caption to congratulate the teachers and students. We published that in the next issue of our college paper.

I know that’s not much, but you have to start somewhere. When I was a boy, we drove to a marshy area near a river to throw away cans and bottles, anything we couldn’t feed to the chickens or burn in our trash barrel at home, into the water. Everyone in my community used to do that before we had trash pickup and landfills. It will take AZ another decade to get to that point. We have a few trash pickup points in Sheki, but only about 1/5 of what is needed.