Badr Eddine Ouhaibi - Tunisia
The Tunisian young woman is chasing the automatic rotary tape while her hands turn over the pile of paper waste that has made her way to the shredder.It is a work that requires a lot of concentration.This young woman represents the last wall of metal wire or glass pieces that could be in the waste and a lifejack for a book or A scientific encyclopedia was on its way to the Holocaust.
Fatima and her colleagues, despite their educational attainment, were able to create a rich library of hundreds of titles they picked up from the garbage dumps coming from the capital of the Tunisian capital.
Paper waste accounts for 12% of the nearly 3 million tons of household waste generated annually, a high figure imposed by the modern lifestyle consumption and demographic growth of Tunisians, making the number of waste collection and recycling centers rising in the last decade to almost a thousand across the country.
| Waste sorting within a waste collection and recycling center requires high concentration (Al Jazeera) |
A passion for reading
Sara al-Kahlawi, director of the Eco-Qad Center for sorting and recycling waste, said that the presence of valuable books and encyclopedias in the garbage piles received by the center daily attracted her attention, and that she continued to rush to keep in her office due to her passion for reading and its important literary and scientific value.
Kahlaoui adds to Al Jazeera Net that girls working in the screening quickly picked up this remarkable interest in books to engage in the beginning and irregularly in the presentation of their hands and books of scientific references before it develops them and become a mechanism reaction and work system respected by all workers to implement it.
The creation of a library of books collected from the waste was an important incentive for girls who were engaged in furnishing and providing them with books, which made them feel a contribution to the achievement of a beautiful and meaningful achievement was not hidden by Fatima, a sorting worker who says ashamedly "harsh social conditions deprived her of study" as the rest of the team .
The denial of education did not stand in the way of girls and women of the Center to find a way to benefit from this important stock of books, as they quickly memorized the classrooms and the ages of the children of each of them to establish a system that spontaneously grew books circulation between their children supervised by the Director of the Center.
| Workers sort the valuable books from the center of waste and create libraries (Al-Jazeera) |
Donate to schools
Paying the important quantities of books collected at the center and their precise classification to adopt the idea of donating them periodically to schools and secondary institutes that receive pupils and students in need areas and lack the physical means to enable them to provide sufficient quantity and quality of reading books according to educational levels.
The founding director of the center, Abdul Qader Al-Missawi, said that the idea of giving books to schools and secondary institutes started from the awareness of the need to contribute to building the culture of the book in children, and that it represents with the working group a link between the value of abandoned books and schools need in their educational activities.
`` By dealing with many public institutions, schools and private institutes, I have been able to convince many officials to carry out initial screening of waste paper, books and references that can benefit readers and pupils by providing their own containers to save them from damage and rupture when shipping. ''
He pointed to the great positive interaction that the initiative has received from all, and said that he is finalizing the classification and classification of books in order to direct the first batch containing nearly a thousand titles of books and literary and scientific encyclopedias to one of the institutes in the vicinity of the center to repeat the same process as the books are available.
Book Culture
Many charities in Tunisia are conducting seasonal campaigns that coincide with school return, targeting children in marginalized areas with high rates of poverty and school drop-outs, mainly seeking to provide school references instead of an educational book that opens the areas of creativity and knowledge of the child.
Hard-working women face the state's inability to provide spaces and books for reading in educational institutions in poor areas by picking up books from the waste to get it back on track, putting it in the hands of schoolchildren and contributing to the road to success.