A Mosquito in Easton
Reethah Desai
Reethah takes us on a guided tour of her neighbourhood and shows the results of a local campaign to improve the area.
Transcript
[birdsong]
A lovely leafy quiet area in Easton, but it wasn’t always like this. When I moved into Easton four years ago I was told how, until recently, our streets have been an aggressive rat-run between Fishponds and the centre. So much so that neighbours’ cars and front gardens were often scraped and even crashed into.
[screeching brakes sound]
But still I looked forward to living in Easton and, by the time I moved in, a permanent roadblock had diverted the rat-run traffic away. Great!
But this ended up creating quiet and isolated spaces which turned out to be ideal for dumped and torched cars and drug dealers, drug users and sex workers also found it ideal for business.
There was a telephone box on the corner, for many years an essential public service. It became a communication line for the trade. The shady, leafy streets and the police’s efforts to increase surveillance on Stapelton Road further down made our streets a safe haven, but not for us! This is not the Easton I loved.
One day I came across this little quote: “If you think you’re too small to be effective, you’ve never been in bed with a mosquito.”
[sound of a mosquito]
It resonated with my own countless encounters with mosquitos during my childhood in Tanzania and India and it tickled me to see the similarity between a hungry mosquito and a drug syringe. I can make a difference.
We formed a Neighbourhood Watch, we ran street parties and we began what was to become a strategic one and a half year long campaign.
Many people said many times we would not succeed but I just remembered that little mosquito. The result: the removal of the phone box and, on top of that, another success: brand new street lighting for safety on winter evenings. Our road in particular has now become a safe for people on foot and bike to Fishponds and to the schools in the area, and many people use it every day. But there was still one more thing I thought I could do:
This morning my partner told me he met a woman who walks down our lane every day taking her two kids to school. She said her kids love the mural and they stop by it every day; “Is that the butterfly plant, mum?”, “Where’s the butterfly?”“There’s me!”, “I can see the dandelion.”, “Let’s wish on the fairy”.
I’ve never met this woman or her kids but it meant a lot to me that what I did brightens up their day everyday.
[birdsong]
You never know how far the ripples go. As for that mosquito, it’s still buzzing!
[sound of a mosquito]
