Reawakening The Culture Of General Sanitation
As we grow from one level to the other, a lot of things change about us, some things die off while others come into the picture, sometimes for our good and Sometimes for the worse. It's the same thing with our society, as development comes and as we advance as a community, we let certain cultures die while we embrace others.
While I was a child, every month, there was always this certain day when the entire community, I mean the entire local government observed general sanitation. I don't know if it was just a rumor or something that scared people but back then it was believed that if the environmental workers should come to your home and find it dirty, you will pay a certain fine. As such every morning on that appointed day of sanitation, you see people tidying their homes, clearing the bushes around their houses, and ensuring that there is no dirt around their surroundings.
Although I have never set my eyes on any environmental worker before but for sure our youth leader used to come around with some youths to inspect and it was beautiful.
Those days, apart from the individual sanitation, my community also fixes a particular day for community clean up, every youth goes out to help in keeping the community clean. But gradually, as I grew up, I no longer saw people practice this thing. The culture gradually died off. The only general sanitation I know about now is market sanitation which is every last Saturday of the month but for communities, I can't remember when last I witnessed it.
Am wondering why? If you visit some places today, you will see poor drainage systems, not that the government has not provided drainage systems for the people but negligence and carelessness have made them allow those channels to get blocked. In some places, people deliberately dumped dirt's into drainages. Sometimes you see good drainage blocked with sand and the inhabitants of the place are not doing anything about it, when heavy rain falls, it then becomes a different story.
Visits people's homes and you would be surprised at the kind of garbage people dump behind their houses, you see dirty gutters that have not been cleaned for years, and when malaria hits so hard on the people they lay blame on nature.
Some of the problems we face are caused by us, your community's road is getting bad and you fold your arms and say the government is not doing its job, you don't expect them to do everything for you, they have tried by providing those things, it's now left for you to maintain them and if you fail to do so, those things will go bad. It's one thing to build and another to maintain.
The government builds water channels, and you turn them into a dustbin and still blame them, exempting yourself. To ensure that our environment remains clean and safe for all of us to enjoy, both we and the government need to work. Thank God we even know the kind of government we have, sometimes they don't even care, when we have some of these privileges we need to do our best to ensure that we maintain them so that they don't spoil on time leaving us stranded.
The advantages attached to keeping our environments clean can't be overemphasized, I don't know what made us too big to the extent that we allowed some of these practices to die, but trust me it's not the best. If we don't keep our surroundings clean, when natural disasters strike, it will decay and we will be the ones to suffer the consequences.
I don't know whether in some places the practice is still observed, but in my place, I can't remember the last time I saw people doing it.
The Way Out
I think the best way to handle this thing is by enlightening the public on the relevance of sanitation both as individuals and as a community. At least if the government doesn't want to make it something compulsory like it used to be, communities can make that law, fix a certain day, and ensure that every house cleans its environment, any house that refuses to comply should be charged some fine, that will go a long way to ensure cleanliness. Honestly, people are living in dirty places, you might not know it until you go out.