Leigh in Azerbaijan

Up the hill from my apartment there is a long flight of steps leading to the next road. I haven’t counted but there is probably 200 steps.  By the time I get to the top each morning on my walk to school with my school backpack, I’m certainly feeling the strain. During the day the steps will sometimes be staked out by beggars and sometimes be used by derelicts to sleep.

For some reason these steps had hundreds more empty plastic drink bottles thrown on the ground when we returned after the July/August break.  It feels like a rubbish dump.  Chee Wan won’t walk that way anymore, choosing to go further and take another clean flight of steps.

I’ve taken it up as a personal project to collect all the bottles.  There’s plenty of other rubbish but I’m leaving that.

Each morning the streets of Baku are scoured by women (mostly) in orange waist coats sweeping the rubbish from the previous day. They are up before dawn sweeping into piles, filling bags, sometimes burning on the side of the road.  Even if people wanted to put their trash into bins they would have difficulty as there are not many around Baku.  The ones they have are usually very small, with a volume of about one cubic foot.

In Soviet days presumably there would have been someone allocated to sweep these steps but they have obviously fallen through the system.  With the refacing of the city hopefully these worn out dirty steps might also get the required facelift.

This bottom image is the beginning of the steps in the morning and the top image is the last few before the next road.

I get off the afternoon school bus and am about to start the trip down the steps.  Baku is not quite as green as this shot suggests.