Noticeable, even after a few hours in Uganda is a thickness, a dirtyness, a dustyness in the air. We struggle to find any public garbage cans. We notice a strange smell in the air, billows of smoke randomly stemming from roadsides and banks of forests. It is burning garbage, and it happens all the time. The options are not complicated: either let the waste accumulate, or simply burn it. There is pretty much no coordinated waste disposal strategy here at all.
We see this in action as we are unpacking a bunch of cables and mice from the plastic packaging they came in. When the job is complete, we have a pile of plastic we need to get rid of, and Cosmas, a staff member at Orphans For Christ, doesn't even blink. We watch him burn it all on the lawn in front of the computer lab...the smell of burning plastic lingers in the air a while, as we realize just how much we take for granted on a daily basis.
All this makes me wonder what will happen to the computers we brought over when it is their time to die. Releasing those toxic chemicals into the air, the soil and the water isn't exactly a pretty thought.
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