Other Problems

"There were other problems, but these were not so obvious at the beginning. I was six when my mother asked my father to get her a garbage can. I wondered what a garbage can was. She said a garbage can was a container for things that had to be thrown away because they had no use whatsoever. That was news to me. We'd never had to throw away anything before. Paper bags, for instance, we crumpled and rolled around and then used in the outhouse. Bran left from sifting the wheat flour to make bread was given to the chickens, as were potato peels and other vegetable skins. Table scraps went to the puppy, and rotten fruit and vegetables were returned to the earth, which gave them back to us the next summer in red and yellow and green. Nothing was wasted. So I could not see why Mother would need a garbage can, not at first. But it became clearer to me as the days went by. We had new things in the village, things that could not be fed to the dogs or the chickens or the earth, things that would not even burn."

- Anwar F. Accawi, "Unbreakable Wonder" (Harper's Magazine, September 2005)