Angelika Schuetz: The Woman Cleaning Up Shela’s Shore

I went to Shela and Lamu Island knowing that I wanted to speak to Angelika Schuetz.  I had come across her social media accounts filled with posts about picking up trash on the beach.  Who was this lady, what was she doing on the coast of Kenya, and why was she seemingly obsessed with trash?  

Angelika Schuetz came to Lamu County from Germany in 1995.  Almost every day since then, for 25 years, she’s gotten up at sunrise to collect trash from the beach.  “Anything that doesn’t belong to the beach” she calls it.  A solitary endeavor for a very long time, Angelika’s trash collection seemed to me motivated by something internal to her.  Not for praise nor recognition, she seemed fulfilled by the act of picking up waste from the 14 kilometer stretch of beach simply because it was something that should be done.  She seemed disturbed by the complacency of walking past trash, something that didn’t belong to the beach, and not picking it up.

I found Angelika Schuetz in her office on Shela Island, a little hole in the wall tucked away in a shaded part of the island.  Angelika was passionate about trash collection, but she was also employed as a resident property manager for Shela House Management, a property company with four private holiday luxury homes that are regularly rented to tourists.  At least one of these houses, named “Beach House” is the holiday house of Prince Ernst of Hanover and his wife Princess Caroline of Monaco.  She was frantically running from phone to iMac screen to her colleagues trying to track down an appliance for one of her properties while simultaneously trying to find lodging for unexpected guests as a favor to another property that could not accommodate them.  Angelika Schuetz, if nothing else, was a doer.  And in the midst of this organized chaos, she started to tell me about what she was doing about the trash problem.  

We walked and talked as we made our way through the narrow alleys of Shela Village to her prized possession: her sorted trash pile.  Angelika had convinced other businesses to invest in addressing this trash problem.  The pollution, she convinced them, would soon impact their bottom line.  They depended on clean beaches to attract tourists.  Beaches littered with trash meant less tourists and less business.  Funds were raised and staff were hired to help coordinate the beach cleanup.  Over the span of two months in 2017, Angelika and her team collected 32 tonnes of beach trash in a community cleanup.  We were now walking towards the result of this and subsequent efforts.  After a few minutes of walking, we arrived at a large gated yard filled with trash separated into various types.  Beer bottles, flip flops, assorted metals, wood. All of it organized into piles throughout the yard. 

In the center of the yard was an incinerator being fed trash by a young man.  This was Angelika’s big project.  The community of Shela faced a unique challenge in that they were too small for more industrial scale solutions but producing too much waste to ignore.  Angelika had consulted with various waste management experts over the years and everywhere she asked, she was told that Shela’s situation was “unique”.  So she settled on what seemed to be the most economical and environmentally-friendly option at the time.  A trash incinerator that could double as a community stove to be used for cooking.  

As we walked around the incinerator, Angelika explained to me that the idea was to feed the incinerator trash slow enough so that the burn would be “clean”, as relative as that term may have been.  In addition to the feed rate, the purity of the burn is aided by wrapping plastic in more burnable material, otherwise the plastic burns less efficiently.  And this is why Angelika was so concerned with sorting trash.  

But as much effort as Angelika was investing in trash collection, as much as she had envisioned a collaborative, community-wide effort to keep the beaches of Lamu clean, I sensed reality had fallen short of that goal.  No one had really used the incinerator as a community oven.  When I suggested that Angelika involve the children of the village in her effort (the primary reason I was in Shela Village), she told me she had not had success in getting them to participate in her work.  When I suggested she start with community leaders, she told me they simply would not listen to her.  She pointed to a wall of glass bottles that had been melted, telling me that someone had set fire to the sorted trash pile and that the fire had burned for days.  She was certain it was sabotage.  

Interestingly, she seemed very convinced that community involvement was critical and that it would be most effective if it started with elders.  But she was equally convinced that she could not be the one to initiate this collaboration.  I asked a community leader about this after meeting Angelika and he explained to me that the local community was willing to collaborate but did not feel seen or included.  Part of me hopes  that upon reading this, both sides of this unfortunate communication barrier come to the table to find a unified way forward in addressing an issue that impacts every resident in Shela Village.  

It was a powerful visual for me, seeing piles of trash sorted meticulously just to be burned.  But it was even more impactful to see in this trash pile bottles, glass and plastic from foreign countries, often beverages that were not available locally.  Waste from the other side of the globe, as far reaching as Korea, was finding its way to this small community on the coast of Kenya and washing up on shores.  This underscored for me the point that the global approach to waste management was only as strong as its weakest link; and helped me make a little more sense of why a German woman felt responsible for cleaning Kenya’s beaches.