A Lady Who Did an Awesome Work in Processing Organic Trash

Yesterday on Sunday I visit a lady (a housewife and mom of 2 kids) and learn from her how to make compost from organic trash in a simple way (I have a lot from my kitchen everyday. I know her name about 2 weeks ago from a local radio while I was driving to pick up my kids from school. At that time the radio set a talk show about organic trash (70% city trash come from household) and invited the lady as the speaker because she has couple of appreciations such like from the Ministry of Environment (she was on top 5 at national environment contest), Japan Government, etc. She’s only an ordinary housewife, but did an extraordinary work for her surrounding environment. I always want to know and get in touch with people like her. So I made a call to the radio station and got her phone number.

Finally I could find her home after getting lost for almost 15 minutes. My hubby accompany me with his motorcycle because the lady had told me before that I couldn’t reach her home by car, since she live in a narrow street. You know what…, we both really amazed of her, more than before, after we saw her home and its surrounding environment. Her home is really small in the middle of a crowd settlement, typically a low income community housing in development countries.

In all her limitedness, she still willing to do something useful and did it with all her passion. She told me that her work begin at 1990 when she saw the river at the back of her house was become more and more dirty, full of trash from year to year. Then she started to ask all of the ladies from her community to collect all organic trash from home, separated them from plastic trash and learned together how to make compost from their own kitchen trash and use the compost they produced for their pot plants. Not only flower, they also plant their own spring onions, chilies, tomatoes and other everyday cooking spices. I know it has never been easy to ask people to do something like that, especially for people who come from that kind of community with a low background education. For me that’s awesome!

As usual the local government here doesn’t aware or always late to aware at someone’s positive effort for what his/her doing to the community. At the second year of her work Mrs. Singgih and her friends got helped from a non profit organization to for a continuation training in organic trash processing. The Japanese Non Profit Foundation (JICA) also help them and invited a Japanese expert in that field, Mr.Takakura to train them in making a better efficient compost. So, now they called their new system in organic trash processing Takakura Home Methods. I saw the difference with the old system yesterday. With the new one the ladies had no worries at all to find maggots. The new system made the trash processing more simple and free from maggots or rotten smell.
Oh, I almost forgot. Mrs.Singgih taught other ladies from her community to recycle the plastic trash like the ones we’ve got from detergent, instant juice powder, coffee, etc into many kinds of simple bags, pencil case and women’s wallet. Really terrific job! (but sorry I forgot to take picture of those things).

I don’t really know about your organic trash. If you live in big countries maybe you don’t have to worry about those things because the government had already processed the trash in a right way.
But here, we must to take care by ourselves if we want our kids still have a nice clean and healthy environment for the next decade. Thankfulness to the people like Mrs.Singgih who dedicate part of her life to this kind of work.
Learned from her, I want try to start with my own kitchen trash first…