In flood-prone Guédiawaye, Senegal, people who are too poor to buy other building materials buy garbage, and use it to keep their homes above water, creating a breeding ground for disease year-round.
Garbage might have seemed safe to the boy because it is everywhere in this forlorn, dun-colored slum abutting Dakar, the capital. Delivered on order for a few pennies a load by rickety horse-drawn carts speeding through the dirt streets of the Médina Gounass neighborhood of Guédiawaye, it is as pervasive as the hot midday sun in which it bakes. The people use it to shore up their flood-prone houses and streets in this low-lying area near the Atlantic coast; they have no choice.
Garbage, packed down tight and then covered with a thin layer of sand, is used to raise the floors of houses that flood regularly in the brief but intense summer rainy season, and it is packed into the dusty streets that otherwise become canals. The water lingers for months in the low-lying terrain of this bone-dry country.
“It’s a problem of money,” said Zale Fall, standing nearby. “The people who live here don’t have the means for sand or rubble, so they are obliged to call the cart-drivers for filler. It’s for our children’s sake. Better to have illnesses than death.”
Ami Camara, Aba’s mother, was not the first to lose a child to the hidden bogs of Médina Gounass. Hanging her head in the courtyard of a four-room shanty where she and 15 family members live, she quietly recalled bathing her young son after lunch and sending him out to play. Then his friends found his shoes, and his body.
“Everything that happens is the will of God,” said the boy’s grandmother, Yaline Ndaye. “We can’t do anything about it.” She turned away.
“All the diseases come with it,” he said, “and they are so far advanced in these neighborhoods. Children are the most exposed. People live all year long right up against stagnant water and garbage.”
