Use all your senses. Absolutely all of them. From the first to the last. Fundamentally the sense of smell. Smell everything around you. Do it for us, who, on the Pinzón Street tracks on Isla Maciel, cannot do it because the putrid smell has clogged our noses. A nauseating reality, facing La Boca and bordering the Avellaneda district, forced to endure the smell of rot seeping from the garbage bags, the food scraps we have to throw away because they spoil in the fridge due to the lack of electricity, the damp mate herb to camouflage the hunger, the flies swarming, the rats strolling, the cockroaches multiplying and a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes in the neighborhood that last summer had more than 100 cases of dengue fever. Now, try to live with that stench for a few minutes. Or days. Or months. Can you? We can’t either, but we have to because we don’t have daily garbage collection.
Now, try to intensify your sense of touch. Do it. Feel the fresh air that fades between the bags that run to walk and the dirt that must be collected so that the children do not get hurt when they go out to play… Here we cannot feel the clean breeze because it carries the smells of the accumulated garbage and even less can we touch the basic services that should be tangible. Our feet hurt from walking so much to one of the ends of the neighborhood where there are containers. Here we only have two small bins for more than 250 houses surrounding the area that are not enough, because the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development in Argentina already said that «each inhabitant produces 1.15 kilograms of municipal solid waste per day». Now multiply that by the total. We accommodate it as best we can so that it does not become an open-air dump due to the lack of collection. It has been more than 2 years since we signed a petition requesting more bins and garbage collection to the Municipality of Avellaneda and we still have no response.
Now, the taste. What does clean water taste like? We would like to answer that it is colorless, odorless and tasteless, but it is impossible: we feel the bitter taste due to the heat and the earthy flavor that comes out of our taps; we taste that bitter drink of living near the Matanza-Riachuelo Basin, historically full of pollution and affected by garbage; right there passes a pipe tied with bags, which reaches the homes of neighbors frequently with sand and low pressure. With parched throats, we organize the «Los Pibes de la Pinzón» soup kitchen where every day we prepare food packages for 260 neighbors.
Open your eyes as wide as you can. Can you see it coming? There, in the distance, far, far away, there is a garbage truck. But it has not yet reached the bins that are in the middle of the neighborhood; it only took what was in the containers. Here we can see that steam that turns brown from pollution, the black bags full to bursting.
It is not a matter of playing deaf, but of listening. There are 250 families who endure a daily life as agonizing as it is hard. We need more containers, we can’t stand it, we can’t survive, we can’t scream amidst so much garbage.
