The few remaining weeks have flown by and I am sitting in my entirely packed up room. Last night I was feeling a bit like I did 27 months ago, the night before I left home. Overwhelmed. Unsure of how I was going to carry my stuff. And thinking about good byes.
I finished packing last night after a couple of attempts at putting my remaining belongings in my luggage, finding space lacking, looking up in my doorway to see a host family member shaking their head and laughing, eventually ditching a few more items, and finally getting it all to fit. I was left with clothes for my final day in Klevan and my last overnight train trip to Kyiv, my luggage, the clothes and other items I had put aside to leave with my host family, and a massive amount of trash. Since November, I have slowly been going through my folders and papers and putting things in our burn pile that we use as tinder in the stove to heat the house. The last couple of days have resulted in a massive growth of the burn pile as well as far, far more trash than I was prepared to handle.
Despite having lived here for 2 years, I don’t think I have really ever addressed the issue of trash. Klevan has no organized trash removal system because the village government refuses to pay for it out of their budget and citizens refuse to pay for it individually because not enough people will buy into the system to make it affordable (aka they would rather continue to do as they do in their current system which doesn’t charge them for burning their burnable items in piles on the street and then dumping bags of non burnable things on the side of the fields away from town.) When I first arrived in Klevan, I think there were one or two “public” trash bins in the center of town outside of stores. Envision a receptacle the size that we would normally only associate with ash and cigarette butts. This trash is collected by storeowners and burned like everything else. I gave props to the council when they finally placed some small bins in the park (until they disappeared) and raised money from local shop owners to fund more small bins on the streets in the center of town. For my part, my trash disposal for the past 2 years went something like this, vaguely able to burn à stove, bottles that could be recycled à pile of recyclable bottles in host family pile or returned to shopkeeper to be used for people who buy beer from the tap and need a bottle (they were always happy to get them back, plenty of people buying beer from the tap,) other trash like thick plastic shampoo bottles or empty deodorant sticks à collected in a bag that I then brought with me on trips to the region center or even to Kyiv to dump in a “real” dumpster/large trash can. I often wondered when I bothered to take the trash to the region center if they did anything else but simply truck the trash back out of the city to the patch across the road on the fields by my house. Who knows. In case you haven’t gathered from the description, trash disposal was a bit of an annoyance and I envied my friend who only had to face a creepy walk through the dark and overgrown field behind her dormitory to reach a dumpster. I envied her even more as we were throwing most of our accumulated lives away and she was making repeated scary but successful trips to the dumpster and I was left sitting surrounded by bags and bags of junk.
My last morning in Klevan and the time had come for disposal. I thought about my options. A stop to get rid of the last of my plastic water bottles at my favorite shop was a must. I knew there were a few bins in the center of town, definitely one at the train station, but they seemed to shift, never appearing in the same place for more than a couple of weeks, so I couldn’t be sure. I hauled my large “babusya bag” full of smaller bags of trash on my shoulder, and once again looking like the itinerant bag lady that my village had come to recognize, I headed to the center of town. I proceeded to dump the bags into various tiny trashcans recently put in the very center of town around the monument to the Great War and the nicest of the village cafes. A bag with worn through shoes, a contact solution bottle, and some broken laminate folders in one bin. Winter I’s worn out and perhaps even molding boots in the next. Some clothes too worn out/sweat stained/grimy to even offer my host family as rags in another. And so I made my rounds of the trash bins, knowing full well I was being watched by everyone on the street at 11:30 am. Finally having unburdened my load, I headed to the post office to mail a box of gifts and books that I couldn’t bear to leave, but couldn’t carry home. I came out of the post office to see the woman whose job it was to clean the center, and apparently also empty the garbage, carrying my bags of miscellaneous trash items to a pile of her own. As I watched her peer into a bag with a pair of old shoes, it was all I could do to stop myself from going over to ask her what she was going to do with this trash. I just didn’t want to know. It was too late to attempt to remedy this situation (not that I hadn’t thought about many variations of this project for months.) I hoped she would find something of use in the bags, and wouldn’t begrudge me the only things I had left to leave with Klevan.
