Unrelenting struggle with pollution in my neighborhood

I live in a country where pollution is inevitable; it is impossible to stop it or not to have it because the moment you raise an alarm or create awareness about pollution, people around would feel like you are doing too much, and that would create enemies between you and the others.

Meanwhile, this same thing you are talking about is affecting everyone, including those who think you are complaining too much, but because they don’t understand the danger in pollution, they ignore all the red flags.

I live in a three-bedroom apartment, and we have five flats inside the compound. If you are a Nigerian, you should picture the whole house and how inevitable pollution would be in such a compound because there is no way everyone behaves the same or thinks the same. There will still be one or two neighbors who would think you are too forward when you call their attention to any kind of pollution in the environment.

There is one neighbor who pollutes the compound with waste and, of course, the waste bin area with their trash, and they never see anything wrong in what they are doing. They live upstairs, while the other neighbor who lives downstairs doesn’t like any form of pollution, which always causes fights at least once in a while in my compound.

There is another neighbor who pollutes the compound with generator noise all in the name of “I can’t stay inside darkness in the night, and I can’t cope with afternoon heat.” You all can imagine how terrible the pollution in my compound is now.

Well, the good part there is that our apartment is the only separate apartment in the compound. The landlord lived there before he traveled out of the country, so we were lucky we didn’t have anyone upstairs disturbing our peace with waste or generator noise, but still there is no way what they are doing wouldn’t affect us since we share the same compound.

The noise pollution in my compound is too much to the extent that I don’t bother opening the window close to where the generator noise is coming from because I get disturbed whenever they put the generator on, and a lot of complaints have been made to the caretaker who is in charge since the owner is not close by, and the man has corrected them countless times to stop disturbing the neighbors with their generator and also polluting the air with the smoke coming out of the generator, but they wouldn’t change.

We have someone sweeping the compound every three days, so we were able to control the waste pollution a bit, but we couldn’t control the noise pollution and, of course, the air pollution, which was made by my neighbor’s RS generator every day.

It got to a point that the person living under the neighbor creating the problem noticed that his child no longer hears clearly whenever they call her, and according to what he told my husband, he said he took his child to the hospital when he noticed she doesn’t hear clearly. At first they thought the girl was just being stubborn, but when they got to the hospital, the doctor told them to make sure the girl stays away from any form of noise pollution because it could damage her eardrums. And that was when this man took the noise pollution seriously and then called for a meeting because no parents would hear that and still stay cool.

After the meeting, it was concluded that everyone in the compound must turn off their generator by 12 am in the midnight, and no one should turn on the generator in the afternoon. We were able to conquer the afternoon noise, but that night they only acted on it for a while, but later they would turn on their generator overnight and then give excuses that they slept off. I don’t think the noise pollution is going to stop anytime soon, or it will be easy to tackle unless we leave the compound or the neighbor who is creating all this pollution leaves, which I am not seeing that coming. Now the man that complained has bought a bigger generator and AC; all he does now is lock his windows while he puts on his own generator with AC.

The noise pollution in my compound doesn’t look like it is going to end anytime soon or later.