There’s a road around the corner from where I live that was dug up more than six months ago. Workmen have been toing and froing for days and days, working on different parts of it with what I suspect is a toothpick, but it still looks like a science experiment gone wrong.

Work on this road has been going on for months.

At one point, we thought we saw a light at the end of the tunnel when they started to build what looked like pavements. However, within a few weeks, these were destroyed again. When the wind blows a little, you feel like you’re walking through a sandstorm to fetch water for your favourite camel. I would despair slightly less if there weren’t another two or three streets being “improved” in the vicinity but it’s come to a point where the only place I feel truly unbothered is at home.

I’ve never understood this road situation in Malta. I’ve been to several European countries and lived in one of them for many years, yet, I’ve never seen anything like our road-mending/surfacing situation there. In fact, the only places where I saw anything similar were Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco. I mean, I have no experience in laying down roads, but, if other developed countries are to be believed, it doesn’t take this long to complete one street, nor do they last so little. I’ve had a crater in front of my front door for a couple of years now, with no idea about how it materialised or if it will ever get fixed. It almost seems like these things bother no one except me.

Speaking of cracks and what has become acceptable, an article was recently published about ‘St Paul’s Crater’. In case you were living in a hole (the puns seem to abound), the road behind the Empire Cinema Complex, in St Paul’s Bay literally looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic film after a pothole grew into a literal crater over the span of a year and a half. Triq Bordino, also in St Paul’s Bay, has also suffered a similar fate. Apparently, the local council reached out to Infrastructure Malta for help last September as the roads were built on clay foundations, and resurfacing them will not be enough, but things have yet to be put into motion. I’m willing to start taking bets on how long everyone thinks it will take to get both of them done.

Dozens of studies have shown the interconnectedness between health (mental and otherwise) and a clean, safe environment but, somehow, this message never quite seems to reach the people in power. What we are left with is a constant assault on the senses and a country weighed down by inconvenience, inefficiency, negligence and abject ugliness.

It shouldn’t take months to finish a single road. That same road shouldn’t be uprooted after months of work on it. Streets can’t be left in disrepair for years because they are not given priority or allotted adequate funding. This is why we pay taxes, so we don’t have to live in dumps or places that look like they’ve recently been bombed.

I don’t know who needs to hear this but there are no prizes for accepting the bare minimum from the people you vote for. Maybe you should remember that next time you leave the house to do your shopping, or to vote.