Village feast performs clean-up miracle

For the past year the residents of Ħamri Street in Għajnsielem have endured living in the pernicious dust of continuing building development, ingesting the visible detritus of excavation and masonry work (not to mention the unchecked noxious exhaust fumes emitted by half a dozen cranes and contractors' vehicles that have been consistently parked, sometimes operating, along the street).

All this year they have been ankle-deep in rubble and cement. Every time the wind blew or a vehicle moved, great clouds of the stuff filled the air, coating cars, balconies and windows and even invading their homes through fly-screens.

Also coating lungs, too (although this will doubtless be explained away at some time in the future as the effects of "secondary smoking"). Not surprisingly, the residents complained to the ministry, the police, the local council and to Mepa; I refer, here, to native residents, for a non-native householder was told by the council that, as such, she had no entitlement to complain about anything.

They even complained to the Office of the Prime Minister - which, it is surely worthy of note, was the only department that reacted at all.

Then, suddenly, part of the street was cleaned up. Dust and rubble were scraped away (not brushed up, for the sweeping brush appears to be hi-tech equipment in these parts, but scraped with a shovel). Some of the mess filled a skip and when the contractors lost interest in the clean-up they hid the rest by covering it with concrete.

Ħamri Street, or part of it, was fairly clean again.

What had caused this miracle? A cynic might point out that it was done a few days before the village festa. The stretch of road that was attended to was the area where two bands would congregate on Saturday night (the rest of the street was ignored).

The cynic might add that this seems to prove that one evening of festa band-playing is therefore deemed to be more important than the normal health and comfort of the village residents, month upon miserable month.

Or, of course, it could be the first visible signs of somebody responding to the concept of Eco-Gozo.

But my money would be on the cynic.