Norm & Jeffrey:  Making A Difference one bag of trash at a time; Selfless Duo commit to a cleaner TCI

By Dana Malcolm

Staff Writer

Norman Rogers

#TurksandCaicos, June 6, 2022 – ‘Everyday unless it rains’ is how often Norman Rogers walks along the roadways of Providenciales, often he wears a shirt with large red letters that any passerby will be able to read. It says “One Man Can Make A Difference.” It’s the same shirt that Norm wears proudly, turning to show the camera over Zoom during our interview. It’s a gift, he explains, from a young man he has deeply inspired with his daily routine, because Norm isn’t just walking, he’s cleaning up the Turks and Caicos.

Norman and his wife first visited the islands in 2002, fell in love with the turquoise water and moved here shortly after, but it wasn’t until his heart attack in 2003 that Norm, an avid birdwatcher, decided to start walking along one of the TCIs uninhabited islands in the mornings and to get his body moving. That’s when he noticed something.

“The litter on the island was getting in the way of the birds.” he explained “And so I started carrying around a garbage bag whenever I started to go out there to take photos of the birds.”

That was the start of what has become a legacy of environmentalism on the islands. Norm has been picking up litter on a regular schedule for the last 16 years, but in 2020 with the advent of quarantines and lockdowns amidst the Coronavirus pandemic he set out walking further and further in either direction of his home each day and didn’t like what he was seeing; he knew he had to expand, and now his current routes are simply incredible.  They are organized so as to cover as much ground as he can.

“I’ve got 17 different sections that I clean up and some of them get done every two weeks, some every three weeks and some every four weeks.”

In the four weeks since he has been working a fairly new route in the direction of Governor’s road he has managed to haul in an astonishing 85 bags of trash. Even more surprising is that he has not done this route every day, since he maintains his original routes as well.

“I go out every day from 7:15 to about 9:30 the only days I don’t go out are when it’s raining or occasionally I take a day off,”  he explained, “In life I’ve been told that one person can’t make a difference and I thought that I could.”

His total bags each day on this new route range between four and seven but he says this is only because no one has cleaned this area up in a while. Norman says the trick is getting Islanders to maintain the clean. That’s where Jeffrey Nicolas comes in.

The other half of this environmentalist duo Jeffery met Norm at the gym and was so inspired by the older man’s tenacity that he started organizing larger cleanups on his own. And with the help of the Rotaract Club, Jeffery has organized tens of islanders to do their part in cleaning up and he also advocates for recycling with large hotels and locals, holding talks with the Hotel Association to see how the littering issue can be resolved. He maintained that recycling was both beneficial to the environment and to hoteliers.

“We’re Beautiful by Nature we have to keep in Clean by Choice” he said seriously. Norm added his own spin “We wanna keep it beautiful by nature but not desecrated by man.”

The men both agree that the most sustainable way to rid the Turks and Caicos of litter is to start working at the source.

Jeffrey Nicolas

Norman explained, “We would like to promote not littering to begin with, the government is doing a good job of cleaning up some areas but at the same time there’s things that we need to do to help ourselves. To me it starts with Education, we need to teach the kids in school…start with the young.”

Jeffrey added, “We need to start to conditioning the minds of the people, I think all of us love Turks and Caicos we’re just not aware of the problem because a lot of the time we’re not looking on the side of the road until it becomes like a little dump.”

Jeffery explains that not only do Islanders need to be educated on the issue more preventative infrastructure like bins on the highway needs to be put into place.

“You’re driving and you throw a bottle out the window because you have nowhere to put it thinking it’s just one bottle but it adds up. I’ve done cleanups in Blue Hill and Five Cays, where in one day we get up to 50 bags”

For those who don’t know where to start the men say spend five or ten minutes cleaning up the area in front of your home, food businesses cleaning up their trash would also be a good start they say especially since a great deal of the trash they recover are food containers which eventually make their way into the oceans.

The biggest takeaway from duo is that one man, maybe two CAN make a difference.

You can make a different on your yard on your street, in your community and on your island; it only takes starting.