🗑️ SWANK Dispatch: The Trash Truck Drives By but Never Down My Road
🗓️ 16 July 2020
Filed Under: public service neglect, municipal bias, infrastructure inequality, disability rights, waste injustice, asthma accommodation failure, environmental hypocrisy
“The trash truck sees me. It simply doesn’t stop.”
— A Mother with a Bike and a Diagnosis, Not a Car
Dear Archive of Civilised Disgust,
In what polite empire does one recycle religiously, write formal letters, and still not receive basic waste collection?
On 16 July 2020, from her lawful home on Grand Turk Island — marked precisely on a map — Polly Chromatic wrote to Kenrick Neely about an infrastructural absurdity:
💭 The trash truck drives past her road
🚮 But never collects hers
🛑 Even when she asked directly
And what’s her supposed crime?
Living on a road with homes flattened by hurricanes.
Riding a bike instead of owning a car.
Having severe eosinophilic asthma that makes hauling waste physically dangerous.
♻️ I. This Is Not a Complaint About Trash — It’s a Complaint About Access
She wrote:
“We still have trash that needs to be properly disposed of… I have severe eosinophilic asthma which limits my physical abilities.”
She recycles. She organises.
But she cannot drag bags down the road, through donkey-strewn terrain, in the tropical heat, gasping for breath.
And still—nothing.
🗺️ II. The Map Was Attached. The Address Was Clear. The Refusal Was Deliberate.
She even pinpointed her location and the truck’s weekly route.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Yet the service passed her by like a caste system on wheels.
📅 III. All She Asked Was for a Collection Day and Time
“Please tell me what day and time I should expect them… to avoid the donkeys tearing up the trash.”
This was not an abstract request.
It was a mother asking for basic municipal cooperation — and being met with institutional apathy disguised as logistical inconvenience.
🌿 Final Refuse:
When a mother with asthma rides a bike to recycle and still writes civil letters for the right to dispose of waste — that is not civic failure.
That is bureaucratic neglect in technicolour.
Labels: waste management neglect, environmental discrimination, asthma accommodation, rural infrastructure failure, municipal exclusion, hurricane aftermath, public service bias, single mother advocacy, eco-justice, donkeys and dysfunction