Monrovia – Naomi Gboya is a mother who makes a living for she and her five children by collecting garbage from homes of the community she lives in.
Report by Henry Karmo – [email protected]
“My friends laugh at me, they call me all sorts of names; some call me dirty woman, but I am not worried about how they think or feel this is what I do for living so I do it with all my strength. If I sit, my children will not go to school; they will have no food on their table” – Naomi Gboya, Garbage Collector, Rehab Community
According to her, she is mocked by her peers for the kind of work she does, but she is not moved by their criticisms.
She lives in the Rehab community, neighborhood to two of the major contenders running for the presidency, Senator George Weah and Vice President Joseph Boakai.
Naomi says she has entered into agreement with seven homes and businesses to collect their garbage’s twice a week for US$10.00 monthly fees charged.
She undertook this initiative on her own because all of the sanitation companies she worked with over the past six years have either closed down because of unavailability of contracts, while others have failed to pay her for her labour.
“I used to work with the Zoom Lion sanitation company, but they closed, then I started working with LIBRA sanitation but the owner of the company failed to pay me for the six months I worked for, so I decided to do my personal sanitation business.
“My friends laugh at me, they call me all sorts of names; some call me dirt woman, but I am not worried about how they think or feel.”
“This is what I do for living so I do it with all my strength. If I sit, my children will not go to school; they will have no food on their table,” Gboya said.
Sadly she does her business of garbage collecting with her bare hands, no protective gear and she has only one wheel barrow to carry her garbage to the recommended site for garbage disposal.
“I will be very happy if someone can assist me with gloves, boots, wheel barrow and a shovel,” she said. – Naomi can be contacted at 0775392953
One of the most vexing problems facing post-conflict Liberia is garbage collection. Huge garbage deposits and other wastes are clustering the streets and alleys of Monrovia and its environs every day.
Most often, piles of garbage and human wastes are directly discharged into the streets of Monrovia or in runoff streams, rivers, and storm drains due to the lack of adequate public latrines and dumpsites in the city.
As a result, Monrovia has become an unwilling incubator for the preservation of rotten, mosquitoes, and other pesticides that pose serious health hazards to the people of the city.
Most Liberians consider garbage collection a lowly occupation.
Survey conducted by the United Nations Environment Programme Post-Conflict and Disaster Management Branch in collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency of Liberia shows that there is a complete absence of engineered landfill sites throughout the country.
Consequently, waste disposal activities are focused on a small number of dump-sites, the majority of which are inappropriately located within wetlands and swamps, such as the Fiamah Site that services much of Monrovia, The Boulevard in Congo Town, and the dump-site located within the town of Kakata.