This town stinks

Er, well, it's going to...

The big news in the Ciudad this week: trash. Lots and lots of trash. The CR government needs a new place to put trash. So...in all of Costa Rica...where would be the best place for a brand new dump? Yep, you guessed it, The Ciudad. And this is not just any dump that they want to build here, we're talking 500 dump trucks a day driving through town 24 hours a day, seven days a week. With very little in the way of environmental protection. The trash they want to dump in the Ciudad is coming from Atenas. And the reason they want to dump it here...wait for it...Atenas doesn't want a dump there. [No kidding? I, personally, am shocked. Shocked!]

The kicker is that the Ciudad's city council has to approve the measure. There are five members on the council, and there was a big meeting last night on the issue. When I say big, I mean most of the town was there. And the meeting ended around midnight (after a 5PM start time). Totally unheard of in The Ciudad. I didn't go to the meeting (I had Spanish class last night and only found out about the meeting about five minutes before it started) so I'm not sure what the final outcome was (I've heard several people talk about it this morning, but all of the discussion was in Spanish, and very difficult for me to understand). I was told by a colleague yesterday that two of the five council members were dead set against the initiative. The other three seemed very convinced it was a good thing for the community (in his opinion, these three were brought to this position through a little old fashioned greasing of the palms). Yea blatant corruption. I asked this colleague if there was anything that could be done if it could be proved that the officials were bribed, and he said he doubted it. Grr...

You know what this means...we don't just need the A-Team. We need an environmentalist, someone who could help restore the friendship and peace to "The City of Friendship and Peace" (the motto written on all The Ciudad's buses), someone who won't be intimidated by the powerful corporate lobby, someone who would be interested in saving a community that supports a University working for peace. We need :