1/27/2024 0 Comments Backbone mountain“It was not until we started to engage with them that they started to see us properly.”Ĭhweya (right) during a weekly waste collection in Kisumu. They saw us as illiterate and uneducated and for a very long time they did not understand the livelihoods of waste pickers,” he said. “We were doing the job that the municipal government was supposed to be doing, but no one was engaging with us. With organisation came more power and a stronger voice, which he used to challenge the county government on its policies. They called us thokora, which is a Swahili word for someone who eats from a bin,” he said.Īs he grew up, Chweya, who was better educated than most of those living on the meagre money earned by sifting through rubbish, began to organise his friends in Kisumu. “They did not let their children play with me. For each kilogram of metal I sold to a dealer I would get five Kenyan shillings – that is like, in dollars, $0.03.”įor a while Chweya was able to attend primary school, where the parents of his friends shunned him. I used a magnet tied to a rope, and hung it over the rubbish to attract the metal. So I started looking for metals to sell from the waste in the streets and the dump. “From then on every single one of us had to go out and try and earn money. We have already died and are still dying, so I want to make sure that the role and contribution of waste pickers is not taken for granted.” “We have been literally the backbone of collection and recycling systems in the world, and one of the things I know for sure is that the treaty must be for the people who have been on frontline of fighting this global problem of plastic pollution. ![]() “As someone who has experienced the deep inequalities and social injustices that waste pickers suffer not just in Kenya, but across the world, being part of this is a very historic moment,” said Chweya. He wants justice for collectors, as well as healthcare, a proper income and better working conditions, to be included in the treaty. Chweya, who now leads the waste pickers’ association of Kenya, representing 36,000 collectors, has been instrumental in pushing countries to recognise the world’s 20 million waste pickers in the treaty. This month in Paris, Chweya will sit alongside representatives of world leaders as the gritty details of the UN treaty to tackle plastic pollution are hammered out. Perhaps it is those names Chweya carried with him in an incredible journey over 20 years that has taken him from a childhood on the waste dump to the discussion rooms of the UN, driven by a passion to ensure the rights of waste pickers across the world are put front and centre of the global treaty to fight plastic pollution. “Most of those friends of mine from the dump died, some were killed in accidents, and some died from sickness. ![]() Some of them were sleeping there in makeshift houses they had built,” said Chweya. “There were a lot of children my age at the dump when I started going there. A waste picker walks past Marabou storks feeding on a mountain of rubbish in Nairobi, Kenya.
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