#travis lupick

"Now there was a pair of porta-potties there and a VANDU member stationed to keep them safe and clean. From that vantage point, the need for a needle exchange was so obvious and so dire that Livingston just went ahead and set one up.

“You called them poison parties,” she recalls. “You would see someone handing a needle they had just used to someone else to use it. So I thought we had to have [clean] needles. If you’re going to see that much public drug use and you’re going to see someone hand someone else a needle, you can intervene and say, ‘We have some needles here.’”

So on the corner of Main and Hastings, right outside the Carnegie Community Centre’s front door, out in the open and obvious for everybody to see, VANDU and PHS [Portland Hotel Society] set up a table, pitched a small tent over it, and opened a needle exchange.

“The VPD came and smashed the table and broke up the tent,” says Townsend.

A game of cat and mouse ensued. The needle exchange was busiest at night, and so each evening, around ten, Vancouver police officers parked a pair of squad cars on the corner outside Carnegie and left them there for a few hours. With police vehicles stationed directly beside the VANDU table, drug users refused to stop there for clean needles.

Townsend watched this from the Washington Hotel, directly across the street from Carnegie. Each evening, he created a distraction, the cops left, and then, from the Washington, a team grabbed the table, tent, and a large bag of clean needles, and rushed across the street to set it all up.

“We’d call the police and tell them that people were unbolting the mufflers of all their cars that were parked outside the Carnegie,” Townsend recounts. “So they would run back and move them. And then, when they moved them, we put the tent up.”

The cops wouldn’t bother with this hassle every night, so once the table was up, they often left it alone. The trick was to take the corner. “It was a weird battle for space,” Townsend says. “This police sergeant said he was going to break the table over his knee if it was put up again. So late at night, in the evening, there was a mini battle between us and this sergeant over who was in control of the area.” The war of attrition eventually wore the police force down. “We just kept on putting [the table] there,” Townsend says.

Blantyre craftsman and merchant Isaac Stone begins his work for the day by carving into a used tire. (Photo by Travis Lupick).

----- By Travis Lupick

Give Isaac Stone 500 kwacha, a tire, and two hours, and he’ll hand you back a pair of sandals.

At just 21, Stone has already been making footwear for nearly a decade. Born and raised in Blantyre, a city of some 732,000 people (2008), Stone didn’t always have to compete for kwacha in the market. He once went to school and had a mother and father who looked after him. But his mother passed away and his father disappeared. And so, when he was 12, Stone was forced to drop out of school and fend for himself.

Born street smart, he quickly realized that his best bet for survival was to learn a trade – to the carving knife it was.

I chatted with Stone as he made his day’s first pair of shoes.

His morning starts at 7, when he catches a minibus out to Limbe –a trade hub on the outskirts of Blantyre – where he can pick up a used car tire for 250 MWK (about $1.60 CAD).

Stone then travels back to central Blantyre where, from 9 to 5, he can be found working behind a makeshift wooden stall, cutting away at rubber.

”I like working with my hands,” he told me. “It brings me money for food. Just enough for a place to stay.”

Stone doesn’t know it, but his small sandal business is part of something very big: Malawi’s efforts to meet the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals.

The MDGs can broadly be defined as a set of development goals aimed at significantly reducing poverty, hunger, and disease by 2015. Target seven reads: “integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes and reverse the loss of environmental resources.”

Stone explained that it had never occurred to him that what he was doing was a form of recycling – and more than that, I offered, he was saving the tires from the garbage fires that so often sour the city’s air.

”It’s a business,” he said, matter-of-factly. “I do it because I can make some money. But if it is good for the air, that is okay, too.”

Karen Price, a project manager for Malawi Environmental Endowment Trust, explains that in a country as poor as Malawi, while many possess an awareness of environmental issues, it is difficult to get communities thinking about garbage.

“I think there is general awareness of the environment, but when it comes to something like recycling, there is much more that could be done,” she said.

“It’s about the understanding of what waste is,” Price went on to explain. “There is not that added value of something as waste – that something can turn into waste or be recycled to become another product that can be reused.”

Stone and his tires are not the only accidental recycling operation running in Blantyre’s downtown market. In nearly every direction, people have repurposed and are reusing objects of every sort in countless imaginative ways.

And it’s a good thing, too, for Blantyre’s one-and-only garbage depot is filling up fast.

Down the hill from Stone, Grant Kenneth, another young entrepreneur, sits in the market with a small group of associates. Surrounding the men are mountains of empty plastic and glass bottles of every size, shape and colour.

”People bring them here,” Kenneth told me. “We pay three kwacha, five kwacha, 10 kwacha, and 15 kwacha, depending on the size.”

Kenneth or one of his colleagues will take the dirty bottles they receive, strip them of their labels, clean them, and sometimes refashion their shape to fit a specific purpose. And then they’ll resell the bottles at a slightly higher rate than the one for which they were purchased.