#8a If Plastic Bags Could be Used as Money, We’d be the Sultans of Africa

The trash problem in Mozambique is a tad different from ours back home in the good ol’ US of A. For one, there is very little trash here. And two, if there is trash, it is most likely to be a simple plastic bag. Let us talk a little more about the plastic bag situation here. Once a purchase is made at any kind of store, hut, or a lemonade-type stand outside of a house the client has the right to a plastic bag no matter how much you spend. It could be 6 cents for a pile of tomatoes or one small roll, but you will get a plastic bag. It could be a 3-cent piece of fried dough and you will still get a plastic bag when the actual price equivalent of the bag is the same of the piece of fried dough you just bought. So what ends up happening over time is this large accumulation of plastic bags in your house or as you will see in RULE 8b, plastic bags littering the streets and neighborhoods. And what makes this worse is that these people giving you your merchandise never went to a training program on how to efficiently pack a bag. It could be a roll of toilet paper in one bag and a juice box in another. They’d be fired the first five minutes on the job of any American supermarket. But in the end, it’s not so bad. Rarely do we buy packaged goods whose packages aren’t burnable. The only times really are when we buy a bag of pasta or a frozen chicken. Everything else like beans, vegetables, rice, and bread and just placed in a plastic bag and given to you. Even things like frozen fish and seafood, goat, and pork don’t have pre-existing packages. Just choose your fish or your cut and put it in a plastic bag. Presto!