Elena´s Horses

Our second floor apartment overlooks the street, and, usually at least once during the day, Elena hears hooves below and she rushes us to the window to see the disappearing haunches of a horse trotting by. “Horses,” she beams and, of course, I smile with her. I remember how thrilling it was to watch the horses pass by while I was staying at my Granny´s in England. We would sometimes run outside still in our pajamas in order to watch them disappear down her country road, the British riders in their black hats and boots rising up and down in the early morning fog.
Elena´s horses in Bogota, however, might as well be a different species. The horses I watched as a child ferried red-cheeked British country lasses for a morning canter over the Common and then were led home, no doubt, to a warm barn for some oats and a good brush. Elena´s horses, however, mainly drag slipshod carts filled with the cardboard, paper and other recyclables culled from the city´s refuse. These horse carts form the backbone of Bogota´s recycling program. You can see them throughout the city at all hours of the day, mixed in with smog burping busses, daring motorcycles, zippy taxis and ever-increasing number of private cars that jam the streets of this city of 8 million inhabitants. The horses do not look curried, brushed or well-fed. Instead, their ribs push hard against their thin sides and their coats twitch against their haunches, scaly and patchy.
Still, you have to admire the serenity with which they weave in and through the infamous traffic and pollution, just as you have to admire the ingenuity of their equally bedraggled drivers. Yesterday, I saw a cart rigged up with some type of lazy boy armchair for the driver. We had just wrapped up my first trip to Exito, a Colombian department store that is somewhat of a cross between Target and Wal-Mart, and I was exclaiming over the ability of cheap plastic goods from China to brighten your day. Our bags were stuffed with Pirates of the Caribbean pencil cases, bright floral plastic bathrooms sets, a child´s plastic orange kitchen set, blue plastic ´drawer organizers, reversible plastic table mats, plastic tubs to keep track of the ever-spreading pile of pens, pencils, and crayons, plastic pencil sharpeners and tape dispensers, polka-dotted plastic drinking cups, and a green plastic toilet brush. Including the boxes of bright cereal, super-sized cleaning detergents, toilet paper and liquid soap, and one-reduced-for-quick-sale veneer bookcase, we needed two taxis to drag our haul home. From this particular vantage point, squeezed in tight between fighting kids and stuffed plastic bags, I could almost mistake the idea of trotting through the streets in a recliner for riding in style, although I was skeptical of even the lazy boy´s ability to deaden the hock of some of Bogota´s potholes.
I´ve also seen a cart sporting a small homemade billboard featuring one of Colombia´s many bikini-clad beauties. The cart that gave me most pause, however, was a cart where all 3 members of the recycling ´´crew´´ (a family of mother, father and child of about 10) were intently reading magazines culled from the pile of old cardboard and paper bouncing around in the cart´s center. What would be their orientation towards the recent corruption-busting article in Semana, reading it on a recycling cart? I wondered. Was that the Conde Nast Travler I saw the lady reading next to me on the elliptical machines at the gym the other morning?
The trash at our own apartment is put out on Friday evenings. Last Friday, I walked past the bulging cans, again on my way home with another cycle of supermarket bags full of groceries. There was a scruffy boy somewhere between Zach and Matt´s age methodically sorting through each bag of kitchen scraps, bathroom tissues, empty milk boxes. He separated each piece of recyclable cardboard from the rest of the garbage, brushed it off and put into a bulging sack: our takeout pizza box from last night when Mike and I felt too exhausted to cook, the cardboard packaging from the plastic kitchen Exito kitchen set bought to occupy and entertain Elena. Here, then was our recycler. No ingenuously rigged up horse cart to obscure the reality that this was a boy the same age as my own picking through what we had tossed away.
These types of divisions in the world are obvious whether we are living in the suburban US or downtown Bogota. My kids live lives of full grocery bags; other kids forage through full garbage bags for a living. Here, however, the obvious is visible every day, just like the malnourished horses that trot daily by our comfortable apartment.