Saturday, October 01, 2005

One Person's Trash...

There is a girl who collects garbage for a living. She used to come by where we used to live because all the garbage was thrown behind the house. She and another girl would walk the line with their collection bags and pick up whatever was useful to them.

I’ve seen her recently at my new house. Here we have a woman who comes everyday to collect the garbage as do all the other house owners/renters in our neighborhood. I often wonder what this girl finds around here. She knows me so sometimes she asks for food or sometimes a drink of water, sometimes money, today she asked for my garbage.

There was a medium-sized piece of cardboard on top of our garbage can today because we had installed some fans yesterday. She saw it and asked for it. I called her inside and told her take whatever she wanted from our trashcan. Here there are no trash bags to pack everything in, it’s all loose and mixed together in the can, but she just stuck her hand in there. She pulled out the cardboard, and some other boxes, old cans, plastic water bottles, every single plastic bag and chip’s packets, old razors, toothbrushes and other things too disgusting to write here. She’ll take them and sell them getting paid by weight for the plastic, cardboard and everything else.

What a way to make a living. I wonder if it feels like a treasure hunt to her. Probably not.

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