Hound Dog
Mar 26, 2009, 9:36 AM
Post #2 of 5
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So, anyway, it is customary in the poor and somewhat bohemian barrio where we live in "Las Casas" for neighbors to deliver their garbage to the curbside upon hearing a gent with a cowbell who walks the streets about 15 minutes in front of the garbage truck that works our street two days a week and it is also customary for neighbors to wait for the truck and foist their garbage bags in to the truck´s cylinder which is attended by a garbage guy and this becomes very much a communal effort as residents hand these plastic garbage bags to the attendent in the truck but I don´t think that that is a necessary community attribute in more exclusive neighborhoods. Rather, if I may be permitted to seem naive, it seems that this practice arises from an egalitarian spirit we have noted among our indigenous friends and it pleases us although when we first moved here we simply left our garbage bags in the street as we do in Ajijic because that is the system to which we have become accustomed but it became obvious to us upon observing the local custome, that leaving one´s bag of garbage in the street for the garbage attendant to lift into the cylinder by himself is an unspoken affront to the indigenous community´s sense of community contribution made even more egregious by the fact that the people not participating in this seemingly innocuous and unnecessary ritual were foreigners recently alighted upon the barrio and imbued with a sense of elitism in the eyes of the neighbors which are the only eyes that matter after all.
So, now, after figuring this out, we dutifully get up at 6:00AM and wait for the garbage truck so we can hand the garbageman his plastic bag of filth and guess what we discovered. That this community ritual is a "bonding" experience more important than an Alabama middle-class white boy can imagine which is d-amned important as it turns out and protects one´s ´property as well as one´s image in the barrio which is really all that one has here to be honest about it because we don´t hide here behind big lawns and Azalea Bushes maintained by middle-aged black men we called "colored boys" and sit on our front porches because there are none and wave at Aunt Maybelline as she passes on the way to the artery-clogging church supper where Preacher Jim Bob can extract a price for bad cold fried chicken that Colonel Sanders could never demand but I am getting off track here.
It seems that the San Cristóbal municipal authorities contract wrh a mountainside indigenous community to dispose of their waste upon the community´s land but failed to pay the contracted price for that right on a timely basis so, in order to exact retribution, the indigenous community elders simply stole the gabage trucks one at a time as they dumped their garbage rather than appeal for their rights at the community or state level. So, here was The Dawg, garbage in hand awaiting the grabage truck and The Dawg noted that, among all barrio residents, he was the only one standing there like a total fool waiting for a garbage truck that would never come and about 7:30AM, one of his neighbors happened upon the scene and The Dawg asked where the garbage truck was. The neighbor, who had not been so foolish as to have stood at curbside for an hour waiting for the garbage truck that would not come and thereby demonstrating utter stupidity and a lack of community connections, informed The Dawg that, of course the truck would not be coming as the indigenous community elders had authorized the "kidnapping" of the truck until the city of San Cristóbal paid all of the past due fees due under the contract.
This must have worked as the truck showed up this morning and took away The Dawg´s accumulated filth.
(This post was edited by Hound Dog on Mar 26, 2009, 9:42 AM)
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