Zibil Thursday
ding-aling, ding-ding-ding, ding-aling-aling
I live in a quiet street at the edge of the gorge that runs through Yerevan. It may be “out of the way”, a ten-minute walk to the nearest metro station, but it’s peaceful, apart from the odd vehicle running past, or some of the crazy dogs which, I admit, sometimes keep me awake at night with their barking… But we just about always have water, the neighbours are nice and the evenings are cool. A lovely view of Ararat is just outside the door on a clear day. I wouldn’t change it for anything.
Public sanitation is not one of Armenia’s strong points, and garbage collection definitely needs an improvement. There are large garbage bins on all main roads and near concentrations of dwellings (residential buildings and their clusters), but the trash is generally left out in the open for long periods. Animals often rummage through them and, very unfortunately, MOST touchingly, a sight that I still cannot allow myself to get used to in Yerevan, many homeless people also try to find something of use in the rubbish.
We don’t have trash cans where I live, so, twice a week, a truck drives by collecting people’s rubbish from their houses. How can we tell that it’s coming ? A ding-aling-aling of a hand-held bell is all it takes for us to make our way outside, and wait patiently by our gates while the trucks rumbles its way slowly, pausing every few houses or so.
It’s an… interesting system, I suppose. I don’t know what to make of it. It is indeed “better than nothing”, but the efficiency is questionable, especially as we don’t always have someone at home when they show up on Thursday mornings. And forget about Sunday; we’re at church then. Sometimes, our trash bags add up, so we load two or three of them onto our car and drop them off at one of the main garbage cans. And the trash collection is a service we pay for, by the way.
When the truck comes by (ding-ding-ding) and stops, the one or two people standing on the open back bend down, while we residents have to lift up our refuse, stretching our arms to meet the gloved hands of the “sanitation worker”. It isn’t terribly pleasant.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that we seem to be the only people on our street with actual trash bags. The plastic kind, I mean. Most of our neighbours tend to collect their rubbish in large buckets, which they pass on to the garbage collectors on the truck, who, in turn, empty the contents and return the buckets. They re-use these buckets, which may seem environmentally sound, but I wonder just how hygienic it is.
In any case, I expect most people would agree that the generation of trash is, to an extent, an economic indicator; there wouldn’t be any rubbish if there weren’t any importation or production. Ten or twelve years ago, there were no trash cans, nor garbage bags, nor trucks, nor sanitation workers, you know. And I’m sure improving this system is already on the “to-do list” of the Yerevan municipality. Maybe the truck will have a new bell next Thursday…
I live in a quiet street at the edge of the gorge that runs through Yerevan. It may be “out of the way”, a ten-minute walk to the nearest metro station, but it’s peaceful, apart from the odd vehicle running past, or some of the crazy dogs which, I admit, sometimes keep me awake at night with their barking… But we just about always have water, the neighbours are nice and the evenings are cool. A lovely view of Ararat is just outside the door on a clear day. I wouldn’t change it for anything.
Public sanitation is not one of Armenia’s strong points, and garbage collection definitely needs an improvement. There are large garbage bins on all main roads and near concentrations of dwellings (residential buildings and their clusters), but the trash is generally left out in the open for long periods. Animals often rummage through them and, very unfortunately, MOST touchingly, a sight that I still cannot allow myself to get used to in Yerevan, many homeless people also try to find something of use in the rubbish.
We don’t have trash cans where I live, so, twice a week, a truck drives by collecting people’s rubbish from their houses. How can we tell that it’s coming ? A ding-aling-aling of a hand-held bell is all it takes for us to make our way outside, and wait patiently by our gates while the trucks rumbles its way slowly, pausing every few houses or so.
It’s an… interesting system, I suppose. I don’t know what to make of it. It is indeed “better than nothing”, but the efficiency is questionable, especially as we don’t always have someone at home when they show up on Thursday mornings. And forget about Sunday; we’re at church then. Sometimes, our trash bags add up, so we load two or three of them onto our car and drop them off at one of the main garbage cans. And the trash collection is a service we pay for, by the way.
When the truck comes by (ding-ding-ding) and stops, the one or two people standing on the open back bend down, while we residents have to lift up our refuse, stretching our arms to meet the gloved hands of the “sanitation worker”. It isn’t terribly pleasant.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that we seem to be the only people on our street with actual trash bags. The plastic kind, I mean. Most of our neighbours tend to collect their rubbish in large buckets, which they pass on to the garbage collectors on the truck, who, in turn, empty the contents and return the buckets. They re-use these buckets, which may seem environmentally sound, but I wonder just how hygienic it is.
In any case, I expect most people would agree that the generation of trash is, to an extent, an economic indicator; there wouldn’t be any rubbish if there weren’t any importation or production. Ten or twelve years ago, there were no trash cans, nor garbage bags, nor trucks, nor sanitation workers, you know. And I’m sure improving this system is already on the “to-do list” of the Yerevan municipality. Maybe the truck will have a new bell next Thursday…
posted by Nareg at 5:48 PM
3 Comments:
I kind of like the idea of the bell announcing the arrival of the trash truck. It could be worse they could have made use of the random hollar method like "javeli sbeeerd" in the courtyards. I can just imagine the guys hanging off the back of the trash truck hollaring "Zibiliiiii Havakoooooom"
I had emailed Shoosh last week saying Armenia needs to do some PSA's about the littering and garbage dumping issues encouraging people to not throw trash and rubbish on the side of the road.
Guys, that is old soviet system. I still remember that trucks and the queue to pass the trash-bin to the worker on the truck, but I thought they belongs to past already from the mids of 1980s :)
When we lived in an apartment in Yerevan for 5 months in 2005 we were happy to see a garbage shute just outside our 2nd floor front door, until we saw the garbage pick up one day - an old truck came, a man opened a door on the ground floor and began shoveling out everyones rubbish (some in bags, most not), he then shovelled the rubbish into his truck and left - very time consuming and messy.
There was a news report while we were there that a company from Japan was going to take the contract for garbage collection of Yerevan. But it later fell through because "they wanted too much money to do it."
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