SENZINE
notes du Sénégal.
La Senzine és un recull de reflexions, records, pensaments i impressions —més o menys viscerals y digerides— d’una estància a Senegal.
La Senzine també vol recollir impressions diverses i créixer amb els que la llegeixen. Les ratlles són per intervenir-hi. Escriu la teva nota.
Nota 00. Preàmbul Sezine Nota 01. L’idioma és una barrera Nota 02. Deserts de plàstic Nota 03. Visita Proplast Industrie Nota 04. Orange Nota 05. Impluvium Nota 06. L’art de trenar Nota 07. Gaspatxo i truita amb patates Nota 08. Tarenga Nota 09. Toubab Nota 10. Port de Saint Louis Nota 11. Objectes aquí i allà
Nota00_PreàmbulSenzine.txt Cada nota respon directa i indirectament a un tema d’interès, que pot, o no, anar més enllà del títol. M’interessa parlar sobre cultura, llengua, tradicions, història, colonialisme, globalització, sostenibilitat, identitat, prejudicis, ideals… observar-ho i empapar-me’n per entendre una gent i un país que, tot i moltes diferències, no se’m fa estrany. Senegal m’atrau.
Nota01_L-idiomaEsUnaBarrera.txt Escolto i observo. Context: tot el matí estic amb la Clot a la casa i alhora taller d’en Mohamed a St Louise, un espai —als meus ulls— diminut, de no més de 5m2. Aquí hi treballa l’ebony (en fa arrecades, collarets i pulseres) i també hi dorm. És el seu lloc, casa seva. Sorprèn, d’entre totes les sorpreses, que hi tingui un fornetfogonet a una de les cantonades de l’entrada. Tant s’hi fa el te, com posa al roig viu alguna eina per manipular la fusta. Les parets estan plenes de fotos de dones. I per allà a sobre, per si de cas el visita alguna noia que no parla francès, hi té traduït: vous est un belle femme → tu eres una mujer guapa kûrël → cu-st-o-mi-zado Com deia, escolto i observo. Com és habitual a Senegal, antiga colònia francesa, el Mohamed parla francès —a part d’altres llengües locals— i pot dialogar perfectament amb la Clot, que m’intenta anar traduint sobre la marxa. Parlen en francès i més o menys vaig entenent el que diuen, però no puc ser part del diàleg. Semblaria que els gestos són una llengua universal, amb els que es pot anar a tot arreu. Certament, és una forma de comunicar-se i, més o menys, d’arribar a entendre’s amb l’Altre, però no per entaular un diàleg de debò. En aquest cas, el francès realment és una frontera; més aviat el no saber-ne. Inshalà en sabés una mica per conèixer (de veritat) la gent d’aquí. Si parlés francès els preguntaria per la seva història: tothom en té una i, prejudici meu, és com que les històries d’aquí hagin de ser de llibre. Si parlés francès, no només miraria i somriuria. Si parlés francès… Escolto, observo i penso que hauré d’aprendre francès. O wolof...
En Mohamed fent la cerimònia del te ataaya durant el workshop d’Ebony ↓
Nota02_DesertsDePlastic.txt A l’Àfrica esperes veure-hi sorra. Tenim l’imaginari de l’Àfrica àrida i seca, amb paisatges desèrtics plens de sorra on els vents conformen dunes que apareixen i desapareixen aquí i allà. En un continent partit per l’equador —aquesta línia imaginària que defineix una regió com una de les més càlides del planeta— esperes, si més no, veure-hi sorra. En comptes d’això, a l’Àfrica hi veus plàstic. Des de la finestra del minibus que ens porta de Saint Louis a Thiés observo la marea de plàstics que cobreix grans esplanades enmig del no-res; una capa multicolor degradada per la intempèrie cobreix l’arena. Una carretera llarga i recta és l’únic que altera aquest gran mar. No s’hi veuen indicis d’haverhi poblacions pròximes. I doncs, d’on ve aquesta quantitat ingent de plàstic? Si Àfrica ja era un continent ric en recursos naturals, ara s’hi afegeix l’acumulació d’un altre material que ara mateix contamina el paisatge, el plàstic.
Bosses de residu plàstic preparades per a ser reciclades ↑
Instalacions de Proplast Industrie a Thiés, Senegal ↓
↑ Selecció de residu plàstic per zones segons tipus i color.
Nota03_VisitaProplastIndustrie.txt PROPLAST INDUSTRIE és una empresa industrial especialitzada en la recol·lecció i reciclatge de plàstics al Senegal. El seu objectiu és promoure el plàstic en una lògica d’economia circular. A més, ajuda a les empreses a implementar pràctiques amigables amb el medi ambient. Després de 4 anys insistint per part del Ramon, finalment vam aconseguir visitarlos. En paraules d’en Jean Françoise Fillaut, s’explica la història d’aquesta empresa.
Al fons, treballadors de Proplast Industrie ↓
“Welcome to Proplast. I will explain a little bit the history of Proplast so you can understand where we are coming from. Actually, Proplast was founded 20 years ago by the Italian NGO called LVIA. The founder is Germaine and she is the whole story of Proplast. 20 years ago this woman founded Proplast with 10 other women and with the NGO, and the first aim was to remove all the plastic waste from the fields. Cause the main problem was to do the agriculture. There was too many plastic on the fields outside Thiés. At that time, the little NGO project became a small industry, it was 10 years after, in 2008, and at this point we met. I will explain who I am. We met proplast and we were the right person to bring to get proplast a new life and it became a social business. So we are beginning the third part of the story now. First part NGO, then social business and then this other step: where we are now. I am here, I’ve been here for 10 years for a consultancy firm, for environmental impact studies energy waste, CO2, and so on, and this is a little bit like an agency. I have created with a friend this french entity (it was 15 years ago, in France), ant 10 years ago we created an agency in Senegal, because of several aspects that I am not going to explain lots of details here, but the main thing is that i was asked to study the environmental impacts of the rally Dakar when it was held here in Senegal, to study the biodiversity impact and the carbon impact, and so on. We came here and Macumba, who is the general manager here at the moment, was in charge of this agency in Senegal and he has some skills in financials, so he add to it the capacity of creating and developing social business while maximizing impact on environment and society. At that time Proplast was about 10 people and the NGO was wondering how to cop with a little firm, because it had to pay the salaries and so, so it was looking for a private investment to help continue the activity as a business. So it was formally done in 2010 and then the NGO was transformed into a society firm, which is called now Proplast Industrie, and there are a lot of specific thanks related to that, and the most specific thanks are to the government cause 85% was given to the 10 woman, that were there at the origins of the projects, and the 15% was bought by us, by my friend Macoumba and I, and our commitment was to make the project sustainable. So the women had no money, all women are poor, but they were given 85% of the business. So it was a great amount of money
that most of them were not aware of that and they just continued to work and they are still selling some peanuts on the street, although they have the main chairs of the business. After a lot of problems, the beginning was very difficult, because we were thinking about raising some firms, but it was not possible because we were not an NGO, we were not an association, we were an african firm so no guarantee, nobody wanted to have some risk with us, and we had to be just ourselves, alone. I got some money from my family, from my friends and at that time a lot of works from my senegalese associate we came to the shift point, in 2014, after this time we just developed a lot, we grew, from 10 people, to 30, 50 till now that we 200 people working here and 2000 people in the streets collecting waste. So the first business model is related to waste pickers, at the beginning there were only 100 pickers here in Thiés, and now we are more than 2000 pickers in all the country. So now we are reaching a point where we have some problem with this site here, because 20 years ago it was empty, nobody, so now there are some houses building here and you don’t here the noise, but the machines are running 24h a day so it is not possible to make an industry here anymore, there is not enough power, there are a lot of electricity issues: we cannot run at the same time the shrudder, the shtreter, the extrusion… it is quite tricky to work here so that is why we decided to invest on a new site which is 10km from here and we are now 1 hectare, and every time we have a bit of money we build a wall or we buy machines… step by step, wall by wall, stone by stone. And now we do not depend on anybody. But now some people would like to require... we had some big amount of money that was proposed from big players. But we don’t want them anymore. Once we have the plastic we sort by colors and types and then the process starts. Then it will be sold either with shreds, pellets or granulates, and actually about 80-90% of the production is sold here in Senegal in a logic of circular economy. Just to explain the different stakeholders of the story: now you have a lot of salaries and pays, but you see that there are 3 associates that are the women, and now that is why i was talking about the third step of the story. We agreed now to move the government and now 50% is owned now by the women, 20% by myself and 30% by my senegalese partner, Macoumba, and everybody has a role inside that and this allowed
us to invest more money cause now we have a new plan and we have some quite big ambitions, and we cannot rely anymore on our former government. But we still have the same vision and the same objective. And the thing is the following: the women are called the lakion, that in “Sera” means courageous women, they are in charge of the link with the population, so if we want to go into a new city they will make the link and to make the project be accepted and part of them. All this time all these people was like ok, your waste picker is all about waste they were rejected by the population. And now we really need field work to make it accepted. And then, Macoumba is in charge of the diversification. Because until now we are only focused on plastic waste but when we come to speak to the communities, territories, and also firms they are waiting for us to take all the kind of waste. Because plastic is the main waste here? Organic? Well, is not that plastic is the main waste but for instance metal is not a problem because there is a lot of value on that so everything is organized. They can work on metal but not on plastic maybe? Plastic is a little bit tricky because you do need some feedback, you need to sort it by type and it is not so easy to have this experience and knowledge. Do you have enough for your production or everyday people come to sell you? We buy everything we can. Just to finish the presentation, there’re the women, with the 50% and they are connected with the population and then you have my senegalese associate who is looking at development in Senegal and other parts, and I am in charge of Europe of supporting technically financially from the institution the way to develop, create and eventually replicate this story in other parts. My job now, we are trying to set up a plastic recycling label based on fair trade. It does not exist yet, and the aim is to say well, we can have a very nice story telling related to this plastic waste so we could sell it with a higher price to people in Europe that could be able to make some nice product, design products, and they would also buy the story telling. And then, with this value, we could be able to support again the development cost of south plastic problem. The final product is sold in Europe? As I said, 80 to 90 % is sold to Senegal industries, and we are focused on basic products. I don’t have many products here now, but is mainly dustbins… Do you do these products here in Proplast? We don’t do final products. We have some partners with Senegalese industries. And the 10% is plastic that will not be of interest for the local market, so we have to exported: European countries specialize in plastic waste, that is Spain, nederlands, Belgium. And we are making some trade with these countries. Now we just want to take a little bit of these production to tell a story. We have the first partnership with the school of architecture from Versalles, in Paris, to do some design products with plastic waste. At the same time we need some guarantees. We try to measure social and environmental impact of the whole story. For example, two years ago we had a partnership with a london school of economics. They came here with about 10 students, they made some surveys with the population,
waste pickers and industries to understand what were the expectations and the insights. We are not here to tell them you should do like this. This is now the state of the art. Now we are focused on adding this new plant. Today is a great day cause we will have the power set in the new plant after months of several issues. And then we will be able to have new machines. The other challenge will be to replicate the idea to other countries. We already have some contacts with guinea, camerun, cambodia, brazil… We won’t be able to do this at the same time, cause our problem is the time. Money also, to replicate all that, but it is about time. Our main issue is the following: let’s say that we are vision oriented and values oriented. If it works is because we have all these courageous women that were at the beginning, and also my senegalese associate, cause he is very sticked into the values. Our objective is to be into a formalized economic, and this is a very difficult issue. Cause all our competitors (now we have competitors, 10 years ago there weren’t) are in an informal economy, not paying taxes and anything, and here in Proplast everybody has a contract, a social insurance… everything is legal and our cost eitherxxx?. So that is why we try to be a step beyond to have a good organization. That is my job being here. The problem, well, it is not a problem. The great thing is that we have new models to collect. Our main assets is that we have a strong network for the collection. That is our main asset: connect, collect and the transformation. The first business model was to have all the waste and the collection point here, but now we have some quiosk points where you go and say: “I will sell you some plastic”. We buy plastic at 75 francs/kilo. We have a partnership with Orange money and we can pay people directly on their smartphones and that is a great thing. That is a new step, and there’s another step, we have a partnership with the senegalese industrie, we collect for example all the blue plastic broken chairs and we will bring it to the industry that is performing the new blue chair and we will buy the new recycled blue chair, so the loop is closed and we have some commercial interest that is with our trash we go to Casamance vary so far it is possible because we have final products, we will sell final products and we come back with waste. Why are they just women? It is because at the beginning it was not… it was a neglected job. Men would not do that. And it was only women that did that. And now you will see men, because now is accepted. But 10 years ago, it was one of the worst jobs. Women played an ambassador role! What I can tell you is that we have been working with a festival in Paris one month ago, where we’ve been 8 thousand people. We have a contract with an architect. He took some blue plastic from us and we would like to do this kind of things more and more. Is that fixed or it is just for the festival? It is still in Paris, and it will be reused next year. And actually, our main competitive advantage is the following: compared to Europe, the business is the same, meaning that the price at the plastic at the beginning and the plastic at the end is the same. In Europe you have 3
people and a lot of machines and power while here, for the same here, you have a lot of people. So, in Europe you get a kind grey stuff, cause everything is mixed, all the colors are mixed, and then you will use that in a downgraded way. Here we can have some special colors and people won’t ink red we will be able to identify cause everything is done by hand. Where do all the garbage come from? Cause there’s a lot, there are huge deserts of plastic… yes, so we calculated that we are just recycling the 3% of the whole amount of plastic. And at the same time not all the plastic can be recycled, it is not easy. We are working on that. And are there some policies from the government to tell people how to use or use less plastic from the population? Is there any campaign? No, actually now… you know about pollution and so on, and it is not easy to work with authorities. Now we have some partnerships with private companies, Orange manéxxx. Now some education is done to the partnerships, to the workers. We just launched a campaign. We will be supported by CS programmes to do the education job. Does the government have any settle with waste collection? There are a lots of studies on that at the moment. It is quite tricky because it will change and there are some studies to optimize collection and to make it work… but at the moment nothing is done. The problem also is that you have a huge abocador (the place where all the waste) there is an illegal place near Dakar, debeus xxx, and there are about 8 hundred living there with the waste. But it is illegal and it should be closed. It is like a social bomb. It is not easy for the authorities to close that. Also our ambition is to get the waste before it goes there. And regarding education, is there anything that to move away from using plastic. Is there any sort of solution down the line what we could move away from it or how could digest plastic? Obviously the best way would be to stop using plastic. An example is the following: 2 or 3 years ago the government made a law banning plastic bags, all the bags with less than 5 microms that were banished and now all the plastic bags are thicker. Made the law, made the cheating. Actually, today I am focused on the plastic news in Europe, everyone is talking about plastic in the Europe commission. And there is so much money spent on people trying to remove plastic waste directly into the ocean. But the first step is to avoid this plastic going to the ocean. And that is our ambition also. Let’s do the things step by step”
Jean François Fillaut, co-director of Proplast Industrie
“95% of the collected comes here to Proplast directly from people. Now we started with different collecting points. The objective of this project we don’t want to collect the plastic in bad conditions. We want to collect clean plastic. If you see the plastic in the fields it is very damaged. We want to make new materials, no waste. Because the final Proplast product is not a product but the raw material, the pellets, right? Yes, here in this factory we just do the pellet. And after we sell pellets to plastic product producers, to our partners, to do the final recycled products. When the plastic arrives here, we sort it by types (polyethylene, etc…) and color. And how do you distinguish by types? Experience, experience. It is our strength, the way we separate plastic. In Europe it is made automatically, with 5% of errors. Here we have about 2% of errors by doing it manually. We are able to separate 100 tons per month. And if you see almost still good products do you separate them? People know is good product, they won’t throw it.”
Macoumba
Nota04_Orange.txt Per molt remot que es trobi un poble, de ben segur que trobarem una paradeta d’Orange. Vagis on vagis trobes cartells en gran anunciant punts de recàrrega de saldo de mòbil. Orange és omnipresent a Senegal; sembla que hi tingui el monopoli de les tarifes de prepagament. Malgrat pugui haver-hi confusió si no es tenen referències de teleoperadores de telèfon, Orange no fa referència a un mot anglès. Allà no ho llegeixen [órendch] sinó [ɔ.ʀɑ̃ʒ], en francès. Això pot semblar un detall intranscendent, però té rellevància pel que fa a les traces de la colonització. Senegal, a diferència de Gambia, va ser colònia francesa, aconseguint la independència el 4 d’abril de 1960. Hi ha molts detalls que recorden la colonització: la propia llengua francesa parlada àmpliament; les restes d’edificis d’arquitectura occidental a Saint Louise; les fronteres rectes d’Àfrica, que fins i tot divideixen pobles pel mig; el canvi de noms propis de pobles i ciutats, sense anar més lluny, el mateix “Sénégal” es deia “Suñogal” —la nostra canoa en wolof—; la moneda CFA, sigles que originàriament significaven “Colònies Franceses de l’Àfrica” i que durant el procés de descolonització van passar a ser “Comunitats Franceses de l’Àfrica”. De la mateixa manera, podríem dir que les paradetes d’Orange també són un detall del paisatge que recorden la colonització del continent africà... o de la globalització? Si bé els telèfons mòbils i internet han suposat un avenç per Àfrica, ampliant l’accessibilitat de la seva població a la informació, el coneixement i la comunicació, també l’ha fet més conscient de la desigualtat i de la suposada pobresa respecte a les societats del benestar. No em refereixo a la pobresa aparent de la seva forma de vida més “rural” (que ateny més a la cultura), sinó una pobresa més aviat de falta d’oportunitats i perspectives/expectatives de futur per guanyar-se la vida de forma digna, és a dir, la manca d’una economia justa i una indústria real i beneficiosa pels habitants de Senegal. Veïns de l’Hostal on ens allotjàvem a Saint Louis ↓
Nota05_Impluvium.txt Al sud de Senegal, per sota de Gàmbia, hi ha la regió de Casamance, una terra fèrtil i de boscos tropicals que contrasta amb els paisatges àrids, grisos i arenosos de Saint Louis, al nord, l’altre extrem del país. Un tret distintiu d’aquesta zona de pluges freqüents són els impluviums, unes construccions tradicionals fetes de canyes, fusta i argila que recullen i emmagatzemen l’aigua quan plou. Podria ser l’equivalent a les cisternes de les nostres cases de poble. A la part central, des del sostre, un embut enorme de palla recull l’aigua. No obstant, a més de captador d’aigua, l’impluvium configura un poblat per ell mateix. És un edifici circular, construït amb un anell d’habitacions al voltant del pati central, on viuen en comunitat les famílies del poblat. L’impluvium es manté fred en climes molt calurosos a mesura que l’aigua s’evapora. L’origen de l’arquitectura de la casa d’impluvium remunta a més de set segles, quan allà al Regne de Gabu, que abarca l’actual Guinea Bissau, Casamance i part de Gàmbia, els Diola Essyl convivien amb els Bainunk (primers ocupants de Ziguinchor), i els Manjak. La rivalitat entre aquestes tres ètnies afavoria la imaginació per protegir-se. Així, els Diola Essyl van inventar aquesta casa, veritable fortalesa en què podien cabre fins a 50 persones, més el bestiar i els graners. És doncs una veritable família africana: avis, fills i néts a la mateixa casa. A l’impluvium que vam visitar vivien unes deu famílies. Ens van explicar que aquestes comunitats tradicionals, després de segles de vida, estaven en risc de desaparèixer per la falta de compromís en l’incompliment de les subvencions promeses per part del govern. N’han desaparegut la majoria i cada cop en queden menys.
Impluvium de la regió de Casamance ↓
Carregant un futbolí en una canoa típica de Senegal ↑
Júlia Claveria Baro Senzine — Acció 0. Habitar el Buit