Dear Editor,

Quite a number of citizens are ‘down in the dumps’ due to the retrogressive state of sanitation in this country, particularly with regard to garbage collection.

There should really be no excuse on the part of those in charge for not providing suitable service on a regular basis.

We have heard garbage about the lack of garbage trucks but this is ridiculous!

The absurdity continues when, for example, refuse is collected regularly from one side of a road and not from the other. Residents on the ‘rejected’ side are then left to wait for days, or weeks, before anything happens. Wah can go so?

Sanitation must be taken seriously. It is necessary to recapture some of the virtues of the past to keep diseases at bay, if for no other reason.

As children, many of us were awakened quite early in the mornings by the tooting of horns, courtesy of the garbage trucks which carried workers dressed in proper protective gear, including rubber boots, gloves, and covering over the lower section of their faces. They ably removed bins from yards and gateways, emptied them, and returned them to their original posts. Empty receptacles were not left in the middle of streets, placed at neighbours’ gates, or ‘borrowed’ to be used as shovels. As for stealing bins and selling them, that would have been infra dig.

In this vibrant new age of technological progression we ought not to allow for any downward trajectory in the matter of public health and sanitation. So, until we have devised a competent means of garbage collection via technology — (robot garbage collectors/ automated sanitary facilitators), we must rigorously train and retrain people who really wish to make a difference in the business of cleaning up Jamaica. Engage them; place them under one accountable system; pay them well!

Whilst the foregoing is being digested, taxpayers within the Kingston 20 area, especially Hemmingway Crescent and Brooke Avenue, to begin with, desperately crave clean-up action. It has been almost three weeks since householders have had their garbage collected. Please help now!

Erica Brown Marriott