It happens everyday around 9 am. That "certain sound" alerts our children to drop whatever they are doing and run to their bedroom windows. That certain sound is the garbage guys (or, as Lukas pronounces them, "Bad guys") throwing the pile of garbage bags into the truck from the apartment building complex across the street.
It has become such an habitual thing for the kids, that the garbage men look up to our windows upon the completion of their work to make special waves and funny hand signals to our four children as they drive away.
Despite some of the photos you may have seen on this blog or on our Facebook page, the city of Antofagasta is a very dirty city. In many parts of the city, you can find piles of garbage (see above) in abandoned lots. The city has been growing so much and so fast that the sanitation department hasn't been able to keep up. In all honesty, it's not ALL the sanitation department's fault. Cleanliness is not the crown jewel virtue in the Chilean culture. Littering is so common it's turn into something culturally accepted. It's more convenient for "OTHERS" to pick it up, but the problem is that those "OTHERS" are thinking the same thought. There is always garbage everywhere everyday...seriously. When we go on furlough, we will be impressed on HOW CLEAN your streets are.
Recently, the city has ATTEMPTED to combat this problem by buying over 20 new garbage trucks and have either started or expanded garbage truck routes in the growing parts of the city.
The city of Antofagasta doesn't just have a garbage problem, it also has a serious sidewalk issue. Not only are the sidewalks littered with garbage, but they reek with animal and human waste. Couple that with no rain and endless days of sun, you get a daily sun baked smell that is beyond description. The sidewalks are also very old. Years of wear and tear without maintenance. After some public outcry, the city has just recently invested some time and money into re-doing several main street sidewalks downtown (see photo above). But since that photo was taken, that same street with the new sidewalk is full of black sun caked gum marks. A brand new sidewalk has already turned into something ugly. NEVER take for granted a clean sidewalk!
An occasional tire busting pot-hole is understandable, but here in Antofagasta, if there's a stretch of three blocks with no pot-holes, it's a rare thing. You know you've lived long enough in Antofagasta if you've mastered weaving in and out of busy city traffic, while also missing all the known pot-holes. Everyday in the city newspaper there is photo section dedicated to citizen complaint photos of massive pot-holes. I've joked to Kristi that if we weren't in ministry, I would go into the tire repair business here in Antofagasta.
Each day we're finding out about some other city project. The hospital building being repainted (above). The city soccer stadium is being renovated. Repaving a stretch of a main street. Construction of a new mall. A stretch of coastline is being reworked, adding playgrounds for children and benches for families to sit on.
Will all this EFFORT, TIME, and MONEY make our city look better. Maybe...a little...for a while. Biblically, we know that the real problem in Antofagasta is not dirty sidewalks, but filthy human hearts. There are wicked. They think only about themselves. The solution lays not in a political program or a clean up initiative, but in spiritually and radically transformed lives. Lives that think of others first and not their own selves. Of course, our family is NOT in Antofagasta for political purposes or for a clean up campaign (although we would volunteer some time to do that). We cannot expect to single-handedly change how dirty our city looks, or how little money is invested in our city, or change a littering culture. What we know CAN help is investing in one person at a time. Sharing Christ and His transforming power in the Gospel. Growing Christians within the context of a healthy local church DO and CAN spiritually affect a city in many ways...I bet they can even pick up their own candy wrappers.
When ministering to others, we come with an unfair advantage: We come armed with the Gospel.
Please continue to pray for our family and church planting ministry here in the needy city of Antofagasta.
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