Fit For Purpose

Somewhere Between Mekhnatabad and Shurobod

“Your tubes”, he mimed. “Give them to me”. I had heard of thriftiness, but this Tajik child was intimidatingly entrepreneurial. 

I had been cycling for months, and the latest lung-busting climb had left me somewhere between Mekhnatabad and Shurobod in the blazing midday heat on my way into the imperious Pamir mountain range in central Asia.

The boy’s brown eyes emerged from beneath his shaggy, black hair and bore into mine. A loose, grubby grey T-shirt hung from the boy’s wiry frame and was tucked professionally into his threadbare black shorts. The boy stood defiantly and his striking, angular features added to the almost inappropriate authority he commanded. His left arm stretched out, pointing towards the deflated tyre mounted on the rear rim of his outgrown, rickety bicycle, and his right hand had uncurled into an expectant, open grasp. He couldn’t have been older than ten, and as I congratulated myself on having found my way into a stand-off with a small child in the Tajik mountains, a threatening smile spread across his muddied face, revealing both his greying teeth and the demeanour of an individual who would be willing to take my tubes by force.

I came to realise, with help from that charming episode out there in the dust, that there is an interesting difference in attitude to recycling between the haves and have-nots. Let me explain. By the time Eastern Europe rolled into view, it was apparent that the litter was becoming less well managed the further East I pushed. In parts of Bulgaria, rubbish laboured across the road in the gentle breeze like tumbleweed in an old Western, and the situation was occasionally so bad in Turkey that even the helpful crows had come out to litter-pick.

Two children using a polystyrene box as a boat in Manado, Indonesia

But communities in many developing nations had also taught me that it was possible to smite three birds with

one innovatively functional stone. And no, I’m not talking about the crows this time. Bird number one is the issue of waste disposal, and bird number two is the expenditure on materials. Our friend, bird number three, is the need for creative expression.

Every day people in the world’s poorer countries do this real life impression of Rumplestiltskin’s miraculous gold-spinning act of turning straw into gold; the useless into a utility. Tyres became flip flops in Indonesia, gutter rainwater became a cheap car wash in Uzbekistan, and road-kill became a beautiful stew in Azerbaijan. Tat was being used, and a need for something or other was being fulfilled, but most of all, people had pride in their creations. They had used their imaginations to produce something for themselves that was not only free, but truly theirs, all the way from conception to execution.

This resourcefulness is something that seems to be eroding in the West as a result decreasing necessity, yet is so prevalent in some of our poorer societies that I had a boy standing in front of me demanding an organ transplant, bike-to-bike.

Back-pedalling a little, we should realise that there is a lesson to be learnt here. Given the environmental imperative these days, we should use all the methods of recycling at our disposal. The kind of sterile, institutionalised recycling we have, with organised boxes and reward schemes is all well and good (and, I accept, highly necessary), but we should turn our everyday lives back into artistic medium, and actually ask ourselves whether we could re-purpose any of our “useless stuff” before tossing it in the appropriately coloured bin. After proudly proclaiming “I made that!” we might just cut the electricity bills at the recycling plants. In fact, my granny used to do just this, carefully re-using envelopes and enthusiastically collecting old buttons. I thought it was kooky, but I've since upgraded my opinion.

The whole thing made me wonder what I would do with my bicycle when I finally brought the curtain down on my cycling act. Create a sculpture from its melted frame perhaps? And use the spokes to craft chicken coop for a local farm? Whatever I decided to do, a more pressing issue was at hand: the expectant boy that stood before me. The problem was, while his thuggish exuberance was admirable, the boy wasn't planning to make a creative offering to the world and turn straw into gold; he was planning to simply turn my gold into his gold. No innovative recycling this time, just theft.

I helped to patch his tube up, and ruffled his hair as I wheeled my bike away. I guess he had turned me, something useless, into something useful after all. He laughed. His plan had worked.


WORDS BY DANNY GORDON