I was walking past Khalifa University, just a block from the apartment. It was the warm-down lap after my jog-slog.

Inside the fence that surrounds the schools (they are big on security, here) a dozen Mitsubishi-brand buses were idling. Most of the buses were filled with students. Guys. I decided they were going off to see the Burj Khalifa skyscraper dedicated. The kids looked young enough that I have begun to wonder if Khalifa University actually is a high school.

Anyway, as I was passing one of the buses, a crumped Coke can was tossed out the window by a kid in a school uniform. He meant for it to fly over the 7-foot fence, but it hit the bars about six inches short of the top and fell back to the ground, landing inside the school grounds, with a clatter.

And that just reinforced something I had been thinking as I worked my way through the neighborhood:

Many of the people who live in the UAE seem to think of it as one big trash can.

Littering appears to be one of the more deeply ingrained bad habits in this country.

Walk down any block where people have been outside … and the amount of trash strewn everywhere is astonishing. If you eat, drink, read … when you’re done, you leave everything where it fell.

In front of Khalifa University yesterday I saw strewn across the parking lot … plastic water bottles, plastic sandwich packaging, wadded up papers,  blowing newspapers, candy wrappers, lecture notes abandoned by a student, and plastic shopping bags. Scads of plastic shopping bags.

All this stuff. Just left. Dropped. Tossed aside. And forgotten about.

In the U.S., I’ve noticed that people sometimes treat the desert as a sprawling trash can. Taking the I-15 north to Vegas? If you’re done with that can, just chuck it out the window, right?

What people there (and here) don’t seem to remember (or perhaps know) is that trash takes a very long time to break down, in the desert.  Not much rain, not much water, and that means paper products retain their integrity for a very long time, and you might be able to read the label of that plastic milk bottle 10 years from now.

The UAE is worse. At least from what I’ve seen after nearly three months in Abu Dhabi.

Any gathering of people sitting on a patch of grass … is sure to leave behind all sorts of trash, when it breaks up.

There just isn’t much apparent effort to pick up after yourself here.

Maybe the hired help from India is supposed to come through, any moment now, and pick it all up?

More probably, they expect the wind will carry it away … somewhere. Out to that vast desert in the interior of the country, where it will never be seen again.

The UAE has lots of things going for it. Oil, social stability, peace. But it has a long way to go in inculcating a really basic pattern of behavior: Picking up after yourself.