Burning the spring in Amman

I just want to follow up on my post from a few days ago, when I wrote about how Amman municipality workers tore out the grass near my place of work (for fire prevention reasons).

Here is what happened afterwards. All the torn grass was piled on the sidewalk, where it has bee laying for the past few days, basically littering up the street. This morning I found one of the piles burning, as you can see above.

This is just senseless.

It’s a little example of how disconnected city management efforts can be and how counterproductive the results can get.

Instead of a green spring we now have a pile of burning trash on the sidewalk.


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8 responses to “Burning the spring: how Amman municipality workers tore out the grass and littered our street”

  1. abed_italy Avatar
    abed_italy

    No hope! This city (and country) is a hopeless case when we talk about keeping it clean. Everytime i come back to Amman i find it worse than before, it is so…dirty? abandoned? incomplete? I don’t think the problem is GAM or the government, the real problem of this city are the citizens! I wish to see a car not opening the window and throwing out the garbage in the middle of the street or in the green. All major streets of Amman and Jordan are full of garbage on the sides, all sidewalks are broken and with cars parking on it, all the green places are horribly full of plastic bags, really so sad. We simply don’t have any kind of civic sense toward the “pubblic stuff”, we care about our homes, our gardens, our offices, but we don’t care about the city. Honestly i think there is no hope for change…

  2. مجهولٌ Avatar
    مجهولٌ

    we like ugly things, can’t imagine life with only clean streets, and well maintained parks and sidewalks.

    you have to see the trash and building debris on the way to/from our houses everyday; otherwise we feel something is wrong!

  3. Amjad Avatar
    Amjad

    this is irony at its best.
    @ Abed your negativity is just as serious a problem as the problems your talking about.

  4. abed_italy Avatar
    abed_italy

    @Amjad

    my negativity is typical of jordanian people leaving in the west, when you see all the civilized world going forward and your country going backward you can’t be positive…
    Man in 2 weeks in Amman i saw more horrible things considered “3adi” from the mass than what i saw in the last 10 years of my life in Italy!

  5. Bilal Avatar
    Bilal

    Ditto Abed.

  6. Amjad Avatar
    Amjad

    i live in manchester. a lot of western ppl come to live in jordan, i think it’s a pretty safe bet to assume that the vast majority of them maintain their positive outlook on life. and yes i know it’s not the perfect comparison, don’t lose the bigger picture dwelling on it tho. you better stop whining, man up, get off your ass and do something.

    the developed west you are talking about didn’t come into existence through a fluke. they spent a lot of time building it, a lot of people have lost their lives for it.

    the issues (including your negativity) raised here are a bit discouraging they are all fixable tho.

  7. Amjad Avatar
    Amjad

    btw the negativity i refer to is prevalent across the majority of jordanians. they are led to believe by their teachers, their parents, and sadly their religion that they can’t do anything and that problems can’t be solved unless (‘wow a shred of hope there’) according to imams at least some unrealistic conditions for developments are met. the one institution that can offer great help with this problem is media and it’s full of shit in this country.

  8. abed_italy Avatar
    abed_italy

    Man, i’m negative for what i see…i see that when i try to tell a man in Amman that throwing a plastic bag or a cola tin in the street is “bad” he simply laughs and says “ya zalame sho howwe share3 abouk” and that’s simply incredible, it means we are out of any kind of civil society idea!
    Change needs a huge work, and the huge work is not building Abdali or Tala Bay, that’s the problem! The standard of “becoming civilized” for 99% of Jordanian ppl is a tall building and a big mall, they don’t even realize what a kind of ecological disaster is Jordan today, air pollution, water resources full of chemical shits, thousands of hectars of green full of “plastic bags”! Once i read that u can understand the “civilization level” of a country just by looking to 3 things, how people drive, how they treat animals and how much they care about having their street clean. Think about this 3 things and think about the last 15 years in Jordan, u will realize that the country is worse than before…