Saudi is technologically advanced, has beautiful malls and wealthy well-traveled people, but in some ways it still seems 50 years behind the US. Smoking is still very common, for one, but my biggest pet peeve is the littering. In America I was a mild member of the litter police, but after a few months here I had to turn in my badge and resort to turning a blind eye otherwise I’d be having confrontations left and right.
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Roads are lined with trash, empty lots seem to have contests on who can build the largest piles, and beautiful beaches are marred with plastic bottles and fast food wrappers. I saw news footage about camels in Saudi that are dying because they ingest pounds and pounds of plastic bags, wrappers, and other discarded items that blow from the highways into the desert.
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Supermarkets here are notorious for wasting an extreme amount of plastic bags – sometimes they literally put one or two things per bag. I don’t need a single bag for a pack of batteries! Or a toothbrush! When my friend brought her own reusable bags, the grocery packer followed her orders to put the groceries in her totes, but then he grabbed a handful of the plastic bags and tried to give them to her. He didn’t understand the whole purpose of what was happening. (The bright pink grocery bags are filling the cart in the photo, which we take from the car to our apartment’s elevator, and straight into our house.🙂 The cart lives in our shared garage area.)
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Let’s face it, as the country opens to tourism, they will have to do better if they want people to have a positive experience and truly see the beauty of this place. Because the beauty is there – underneath the Al Baik bags and cigarette butts. I do sense that Saudi is shifting with the young people, many who are pushing for sustainability and eco-friendly methods to be adopted. Hopefully they can start a movement among the new generation of Saudis to instill a sense of pride in their country and a responsibility to their fellow man, not to mention earth itself….and camels.
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