No Salad For Me, Thanks

ignorance is bliss. yeah, yeah, so in college i had a t-shirt that read 'ignorance is bondage'. i only wore that so that people would think that i already knew stuff and wouldn't try to load the knowledge on me. ignorance. such bliss. i know i felt a lot better when i stopped watching the news shows after the 2004 presidential elections. so what was i thinking when i decided to read the story about global sludge in ivory coast ending in tragedy? well i certainly wasn't thinking that i was about to learn something, i tell you that. except maybe the the name of a remote village, if i was lucky. i mean it was a small story. i had not seen it breaking anywhere. if it were anything important, well, it would have been on the news everywhere. that is what happens with important stories.

but, no. i got me a whole lot of graphic and unwelcome knowledge - about 400 tons of it. all about a greek-owned tanker, flying a panamanian flag, leased by the london branch of a swiss trading corporation which has its fiscal headquarters in the netherlands. first lesson - globalisation. turns out this tanker was carrying a whole lot of petrochemical waste and caustic soda and a whole bunch of other things we are not being told about. the tanker first went to safely dispose of this waste in europe but were told that it would cost about half a million dollars (apparently this was waste, the likes of which had never been seen before). understandably, this company that had revenues of $28 billion were like - oh hell no, that's too much money! are you trying to impoverish us. we're going to take our waste; we won't let you fleece us.

and the tanker chugged over to ivory coast where in the dead of night, trucks lugged the raw, untreated waste to various dumps around abidjan (because if you are doing something legal with harmless waste, the only reason you dump it in the dead of the night is to avoid the morning traffic rush). the inhabitants of the ivory coast's capital city woke up to noxious fumes and black sludge. at least 8 people have died, more have been hospitalised and scores more have sought medical attention - nosebleeds, stomach aches, headaches. six month-old salam oudrawogol's body is covered in sores and looks as though he is recovering from burns.

trafigura, the company of the tanker, released a statement to let the people of abidjan know that all this sickness was purely in their heads or maybe due to bad spinach because they had run tests on the waste and found that the material that was dumped was of "little or no toxicity". and regarding all the death and sickness doing the rounds "it is still unclear exactly what caused the tragedy."

but it wasn't the waste that they dumped, that was just a coincidence. come on, people, these companies are run by fellow human beings who value life over money. if they had any idea at all that the waste was in any way dangerous, they would have shelled over the half a million dollars for safe disposal. there is no way they would have sent trucks, in the middle of the night, to dump toxic waste at at least 18 sites in well populated city. it is all a big misunderstanding. we all know that you can't just dump on a nation of peoples and cause death and illness and get away with it.

well, i might if i weren't so busy being blissfully ignorant. aaahhh. i feel better already.