Living the Green Life

My attempt at water collection, before I really knew what I was doing.

And by “green” I really mean brown – as in the color that your food turns when you don’t eat it and it’s left in the compost bucket for crows to scavenge.

6/6/09: Today I made mushroom soup from a packet for lunch. After the requisite 6 minutes of cooking (the one thing all my lunches have in common is their quick prep time) it was a congealed pinkish-gray. It resembled Java the Hut more than any soup I’ve ever encountered, but when faced with the possibility of not eating it, I was immediately confronted with what it would look like in a few hours, or days, mixed in with the rest of my food waste in the oddly cheerful red bucket that occupies the farthest corner of my court yard. In fact, that image was so frightful I actually ate half the bowl before Java the Hut won.

Claire and I often joke about the ease with which we have converted to our “green” life here – no plastic bags (they’re illegal), taking the most gas efficient public transport within safety limits (actually we’re stretching the safety, but still, van service is considered more efficient than bus services because they more often run at maximum capacity, and here they’re almost always beyond max cap), eating our “organic” vegetables (the only ‘additives’ you worry about are parasites)… All these changes felt pretty easy since we didn’t have another choice. But my more recent adaptations – again forced by circumstance – have been harder to get used to. These changes fall into two major categories: water usage and garbage disposal.

6/18/09: Water is back to being a problem (my pipes are more like decoration these days). I managed for the first month (May) without water thanks to the rain, but dry season is officially here and with it come water worries. Worry has two sides – awareness and difficulty. On the one hand, now that it’s precious, I only use the very smallest amount of water I need to get a job done and I know exactly how much I need for everything: I am a master at the bucket shower, and the approximate 4L that my biggest pot can hold feels luxurious; I know that rice takes less water to cook than pasta but more to clean out of the pot (pasta, basically leaves the pot clean when it’s done – a little extra starch never hurts the next batch). Even then, I reuse all water I can – wash my hands over pots that need to be soaked a bit, use soapy laundry water to wash the floor, etc. And when/if it does rain, I have the rain water collection down to a beautiful system. In our last big storm I managed to fill two jerry cans, and five 5L jugs (the trick is a good funnel and some pots to catch water while you switch out full containers). This all sounds environmentally idyllic – oh, me and my efficient house – but when I have to choose between showering and washing dishes (at which point laundry just feels wasteful and luxurious), I really wish for the guilty abundance of America.

Similarly, I am both proud and profoundly annoyed at my garbage system. I now separate burnable, plastic, food plastic (can't be kept in the house) and food waste. I've mentioned the red bucket already, so I'll spare you further descriptions of that... Everything else is pretty painless - I especially love burning my burnables because they disappear! The catch is competitive non-wastefulness. I have a shared dump spot out back, so I feel constantly under inspection ("oh look at that wasteful American"). Furthermore, while everyone else seems fine with dumping non-biodegradables out back, I am not, which leaves me with the slightly awkward task of getting rid of my plastics some other way. (I've thrown them out at Claire's where the street kids love to take her garbage, but where I'm pretty sure I'm still littering in the long term, and when my parents were here I guiltlessly left it in their hotel room for housekeeping, but now that luxury is gone.)

Oh, the problem of plastic.