We can't talk of living a quality life without having a healthy environment. Our environment contributes greatly to our health, either positively or negatively, and that's why striving to have a healthy environment is not negotiable.
The place I lived before I relocated here was nothing close to a healthy environment. First, it's an estate where everyone has their own building, not even shared apartments but a full bungalow, one for each family clustered together. So you can hardly say something loud without the people in the other house hearing you. That environment was something annoying, seeing how the inhabitants cause nuisance every now and then.
There wasn't an industry inside the estate, and yet, we deal with heavy noises. Some people turned their home into a club, inviting all manner of people to dance and play loud music all through the weekends.It's the type of noise that pursues sleep away from your eyes all through the night. Then they smoke cigarettes and others, and the smell can be terrible. The whole of my environment during the weekend was always saturated with both noise and air pollution. If I had so much money, then I would have been spending my weekends at a serene hotel with my family, but we had to deal with such an environment for the five years we lived there.
Is Lagos's environment even healthy? Where will I start? Is it the smelly gutters or the improper waste disposal? The unending noise pollution? It's simply crazy. I visited one of the estates here, a very big and greenish estate where millions are paid for rent, but yet, the gutters smell so terrible. It is either you cover your nose and walk past or struggle with your breath. I was also in Lekki on Tuesday, and I couldn't believe such an expensive area in this city could be so messy like this. I was literally closing my eyes while walking fast because of the kind of dirt I see littered everywhere. People will choose to poo inside a nylon and just trash it by the roadside. If you are not careful, you may even match it.
Sometimes the amount of rent we pay in certain places here isn't worth the unhealthy environment.
An idea of a healthy environment to me is a place devoid of dirt, a clean surrounding,where germs or bacteria wouldn't harbor, breed mosquitoes, and affect my health. An environment devoid of both air and noise pollution. A safe and serene environment that makes living worth it and not the one I would be scared to sleep at night due to robbers.
Is my environment healthy? I wouldn't say yes at all because as much as I clean both the inside of my home and my surroundings always, we still harbor waste within the street. You will just open the gate and meet heaps of waste that take the waste management people forever to come do their duty. Besides, my neighbors don't even care to dispose of their waste properly in order to avoid payment but trash it in any empty land around, and of course we inhale the whole shit, not to talk of those burning whatever , spreading smoke as if they are perfuming our environment always.
Overall we need a collaborative effort to ensure a healthy environment and live healthy. We can take responsibility and be consistent with the little effort we make in order to have a clean and safer environment.
This post is in response to the #HiveLearners community contest on the topic titled, A HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT.