There it is my friends, #cleanupHaiti2024, let’s get together and do something about how persons live in Haiti. 2024 should be a year we can point to as a time to proudly invite others to visit our country. It will then be two hundred and twenty years since our independence and the fight that signaled the birth of the Republic of Haiti as an independent nation and a world power in the Antilles. To celebrate the achievements of our ancestors in dignity let’s clean up our doors, parks, rivers and neighborhoods in order to receive our guests. The first thing you do to signal a new start is to clean up your environment. It’s like cleaning the body prior to engaging in a spiritual quest. You bathe carefully and anoint the body with essences to prepare for a passage into another timeframe.
So it is with our country, where people live next to mounds of garbage daily. Every time you hear a news roundup on radio broadcasts from Haiti, the reporters invariably mention piles of trash everywhere. The other day on Radio Zenith, a reporter spoke about mounds of trash near Fort Jacques, a major tourist attraction for locals and schoolchildren, along with the putrid smell that filled the area. In marketplaces, merchants sit next to garbage, selling food items with no regards for health and diseases, with flies everywhere. After listening to a reporter describing how persons in a neighborhood set fire to a huge mound of garbage because it was there too long, I remembered how this same thing used to happen in front of my house in Boudon, until we managed to stop this from happening. It was a nightmare, with the acrid smell of the smoke practically driving you out of your home to get away. The population has no idea about what to do with trash. It has become necessary to change course before it’s too late because we are exposing ourselves to all types of diseases that can affect anybody, regardless of how much you have.
We need to come together and clean up the country so that in a couple of years Haiti looks truly like a pearl of the Antilles. If we cannot come together and instill in each other the pride that comes from cleanliness how can we think of uniting to do anything else. We need to look at this campaign as a simple achievement that will require huge, but manageable efforts.
#cleanupHaiti2024 is a simple idea. Let’s make it viral, so that all who want can get onboard, anywhere and at any time. This is not my movement, or my organization; it’s an idea that needs to grow where we become a network, much like the internet, with no one in charge, but each group working toward that goal of physically cleaning our country neighborhoods by neighborhoods, town by town and beyond. Stopping the population from living in garbage, and jeopardizing their health will necessitate a change in mentality. With the physical removal of garbage we will need experts to help deal with recycling and reuse of household trash into compost for agricultural production. All of this is not a new idea, and I’m sure there are many reports gathering dust in file cabinets or on USB keys talking about that. In Haiti, I believe there are small efforts at recycling plastic items already in place, but they only scratch the surface, and plastic along with toxic materials are polluting our island. Old out of date telephones are a perfect example of toxic waste, with their batteries thrown out anywhere with no one realizing the danger associated. So not only do we need to clean the environment, we also need to change our mentality and not accept the garbage that comes from the U.S. and Canada. A lot of that second hand stuff is garbage sent to save the sender from the proper disposal some of those items require, like old computers, telephones and many other toxic materials.
#cleanupHaiti2024. On January First of that year let’s have a clean house, so that persons coming for the first time, or returning for the celebration, can feel clean and happy. If everyone, or nearly everyone is involved, we can achieve this great feat with a genuine common effort. Each can participate as much as his/her capacities allows. It only requires all of us wanting to see our country clean and free of toxic waste. Our children require that we clean the environment, so that their health is not jeopardized. 2024 is a good year to have that turn around implemented fully, with everyone onboard, all resulting from our efforts now.
#cleanupHaiti2024 would like for all readers of this blog to take this idea and help make it real. Think about how you and your friends can come together and become a branch of this tree that will bear cleanliness to our place of living. This idea needs to germinate and become a reality, so that we can begin the cleansing that will help us begin a better life. Before we change our ways we must clean the body, so that the spiritual quest can take place. We have a simple beauty that starts from the inside, and spreads into a rainbow of creativity unparalleled. We just need to clean up , that’s all.
Dèyè Mon 