Garbage must be removed

Lise Præstegaard works as MS development worker supporting an environmental and health group in the city of Nampula in Mozambique.

MS development worker Lise Præstegaard, photo: Adam Amsinck

“People here around Rio Muatala are happy about the attention drawn to their problems and that someone takes them seriously. Not much attention has been paid to them earlier. There are good services in the city centre where only five percent of the population lives. There is clean drinking water and garbage collection. In this area, we never see a refuse collection lorry, and people feel let down.”

Lise Præstegaard, 37 years, is posted as an environment worker for MS in the town Nampula in northern Mozambique along with her husband and their two daughters who are ten and thirteen years old. She is a qualified biologist, and has been instrumental in developing, launching and co-ordinating a project on collection of garbage in the town’s slum areas. The project which is implemented with local environmentalists started in November 2002, and comprises eight groups with ten women in each. The women who are between 19 and 60 years collect garbage in their areas and advise the people on using latrines, preserving drinking water and handling garbage from households.

Muatala, which is one of the polluted areas, is also the name of the river that flows through the town – provided the rainy season fills it up with water. It is however not the case early this morning when we meet Lise Præstegaard in the dried up river bed in which human excrement, plastic bags and household garbage flow; causing a mixture of filth and health hazards.

Disease trap

“People relieve themselves everywhere and when it rains, it brings coli bacteria. There are too few latrines and the population is dense. It smells, and although you can not see the bacteria, they are there,” says Lise, who along with the local women groups, persuades people to install latrines that are delivered free of charge by UNICEF.

“When it rains heavily during rainy season, the water flows down from the city centre to the surrounding slum areas where the poor live. It carries garbage with it as well as polluting the river which the women use for washing clothes, and the children for playing and bathing. This is a trap for diarrhoea–borne diseases, cholera and malaria because mosquitoes breed in stagnant water,” she says.

”The pollution and rubbish in the stagnant water make them a trap for diarrhoea-borne diseases, cholera and malaria. Therefore, we have a team of local environmentalists who remove garbage in the morning and later walk from house to house to inform people how they can improve sanitation and handle garbage from the households.”

Lise Præstegaard

About 30.000 people live in Nampula city centre – also called the ‘cement city’ – and more than 300.000 people live in the slum areas which stretch down the hill from the city centre. It is here that the local environmentalists work from sunrise at 5 o’clock. They come with rakes and spades, and collect the visible rubbish in heaps which the municipality has promised to collect in tractors or lorries. However, there is a problem with co-operation between the environmentalists and the municipal authorities.

Photo: Adam Amsinck

Women face the music

“The people in the municipality’s technical administration use the tractors for their own interests, or they dump the garbage at different places in inhabited areas,” says Lise, who is as frustrated about the local administration as she is proud of the 80 environmentalists who work in the slum.

“Many people can not read. Therefore, information is given from mouth to mouth. The activists walk from house to house. However, they have also staged plays and made radio spots with information on sanitation and garbage,” she tells about the groups that solely consists of women.

“In the beginning, there were men who wanted to join in, but there is a tendency for men to take control of the group. Women work in a better way without men. The women say that the men just sit under the mango tree and chat – women are more accustomed to working and they work extremely well together. We have selected those who had already shown initiative in the local community and enjoyed respect,” Lise explains.