Arroyos of Barranquilla

When building Barranquilla, colonist and engineers forgot one key aspect of city planning, water infrastructure.  There are pipes that deliver water to my home and take the waste-water away.  There is also a well established water company in the city.  However, the streets are made mostly made of impermeable material and there are no storm drains.  Barranqilla is a pore-less city.  It is also built on a slight incline so that the northern part of the city is higher than the southern part of the city.  This means that each time it rains for more than a few minutes, several of the streets turn into impassable arroyos.

In addition, there are problems with trash disposal in Barranquilla, or  rather, people do not know how to dispose of their trash appropriately.  This is one of my main problems with living on the coast of Colombia.  I can not go a day without watching someone throw their trash on the ground.  I would argue that in Barranquilla, no matter your level of education or socio-economic status, that you are likely to liter regularly (people use all types of excuses; there are not enough trash cans on the street, people are hired by the city to pick up my trash so I am helping with unemployment, ect.) The trash builds up, primarily in the part of the city where people don't have other people cleaning up after them, and when it rains all of this trash is washed into the arroyos, in to the river and finally the ocean. 

Yesterday I drove from the city to the beach and saw Arroyo Leon for the first time.

There is so much trash in this particular arroyo that you might confuse it for a landfill.  Occasionally the city brings in construction equipment to clean it out (although it looks like they clear the waterway and dump the trash about 100 meters away).  However, this type of contamination of water ways is not unusual.  When I arrived back in Barranquilla at the beginning of August, it had been raining significant amounts every day.  In the taxi from the airport to my home, I saw at least 6 lot sized piles of wet, rotting trash, that the city had pulled out of the arroyos to unclog them and had left on the side of the road.

When problems are this complicated and a solution must be multifaceted where do you start?  How did the U.S government and non-profit organizations change American's mentalities to think that littering is wrong, bad, tasteless or irresponsible.  I am not arguing that all Americans don't liter but rather that American ideas about trash are much different than Colombians.  The result is that Americans are more likely to put their trash in an official trash can where they know it will be collected and stored by the city in the local landfill.  Besides making the city more porous there must be a public service and education campaign to change ideas on trash disposal.