RobinRobin Haiku: Recyclers Are The City Blacksmith

Recyclers Are the City Blacksmith - by RobinRobin


Guiyu's not dumping
Harvest IC chips - it's smart
Imperfectly wise

Hong Kong's not dumping
Monitors Rebuilt TVs
Re-manufactured

Agbogbloshie films
Capture urbanization
City waste, recycled

Teledensity
Demand for education
Mankind makes cities

Rapid city growth
Is dirty, unlike forests
But melds womens rights

cont.



City traffic honks
We rub our eyes in smoke smog
Emerging Markets

It's right to progress
Their right, their choice, their mistakes
Liability

Secondhand markets
Are not illegal dumping
Planned obsolescence

Project Eden Sucks
Urbanization makes waste
But also school classrooms

Spreading mango tree
Under it a repairman guts
Laptops and motors

Storybook Africa
Fairytale China, Brazil
Mowgli's India

Dirty pics of kids
Posed in smoke on city junk
NGO cash cows 

Exoticism
Promotes racial profiling
Another man's skin

Eden villages
Forests, rural savannah
Pure air and water?

West fascination
With exotic greenery
Not our choice to make

Choices are cities
Or backward village problems
Not our choice to make

Between city growth
Cell phones, noisy pollution
Traffic jams and schools

Or Boka Haram
Taliban, Womens nooses.
Let girls have cities

Yes they are dirty
Recycling challenges
Let's help, not arrest

Hurricane Benson
Needs not only his freedom
But apology

Thanks Thanks to you
My worthy friend's lesson wraught
City Blacksmith smoke

Tech Sector Geek
Looks the whole world in the face
Owes not any man 

- by RobinRobin

~~~~ ~ ~ __ -

That's a nickname they gave me in Tamale, Ghana.  "NameName" is an affectionate handle, like adding "-san" in Japanese.

I admit that I myself, in embracing the cause of urbanization and developing world Tech Sector economies, have a "noble wind" at my back.  I'm pausing and writing from the comfortable chair of a warm Vermont home, having just chatted with 3 men in Agbogbloshie by Facetime.  It's way too easy for me, but I know the shame trap is worse than the happiness of just accepting different friends.

Most of my blogging has been policy-wonkish.  From time to time I guess I like to throw a line to the humanities crowd, the bleeding hearts in the USA and EU who maybe don't know how their computers even work, but feel guilty about them, and whose buttons are pressed to make us think that arresting a TV repairman from Nigeria, and torching his life and business, was something other than a modern racist lynching.  The NGO who called him "collateral damage" has to be outed from every possible direction.  We need the educated, the rural, the women, the environmentalists, the greedy capitalists, everyone in the crowd herded by their guilt-button hoax, to disarm them.  The whole crowd, liberals and conservatives, greedy and nurturing, everybody has to confront environmental quackery.