On the sanitation front, Male is now another story and from
where the infection of our degrading sanitary culture will surely expand as we
move around with the high we get from our energy drinks and our bloated egos
that drive our selfish and competitive culture which we revere or blame on a
materialistic culture that is pervading not only Maldives but the whole world.
So what? Just as one of my acquaintances glibly retorted -- "Why not a bit
of corruption and fun; the countries that progress in this world embody such
novo culture; it’s what will move us from the 18th century to the 21st!".
and I thought, “Allah help us from such utterances and the minds that conjure
such thoughts!”
Not merely the spitting now but the littering culture has -
as I reported in an earlier blog - pervaded only too starkly onto our watery
environment too. Now not with just empty bottles and cans drained of their
tasty contents but from such as we may call kitchen waste. Rinds of water
melon, oranges and mangoes float on out in our inner harbour in Male along with
chomped up apple cores, empty gutka sachets, swirling in the eddies along with
onion peels and putrefying vegetable matter perhaps from the discard of the
fresh fruits and vegetable market located in the Male water-front. Not
surprisingly, there is not a whimper of an effort from the moored up boats
there to make their surroundings any cleaner. For all I know they would be
pumping their own wastes into this enclosed body of water thinking that this
God-given ocean can never be polluted. And so why should they clean up? After
all, there is the municipal authority that is paid to do this for us from the
tax-payers’ money? Yes indeed! Logical,
but not ethical from our human perspective! We cannot forget that Male is our
home and every part contained within its perimeter is ours to pay heed to. In
the emerging pride and arrogance of our so-called development, we should not
sweep away the health of our nation like the proverbial waste swept under the
carpet.
Yet, I was pleasantly surprised the other day at what a
group of youth was engaged in at the usfasgandu area in south Male -- that was
an injection of hope into my veins. In the jolly merriment of their being, they
brooked no ego to picking up the filled up litter from between the tetra-pods
of the southern Male embankment and any other such along the swim track area to
fill so many garbage bags to which I wondered what the city council was doing
when the conscience of this youth group was being piqued. Indeed these
conscious youth are aware of what their sanitary future could be in Male even
if their adults could not care two hoots. But then all youth are not alike; those
youth who have matured into and irresponsible culture of littering must also be
addressed if the equation of cleaning and littering should veer towards
cleanliness. May Allah inject that much needed conscience into both our
youthful and mature polity in the democratic years ahead!
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