I never thought I'd be happy to know that my neighbors go through my trash . . .
So as you know, Jen and I have moved into the city now. And one of our neighbors is a Chinese couple that own a tiny little store that sells water, chips and liqueur. When Jen and I moved in a little over a month ago, we had a TON of boxes that we threw out each day. And one night, after I had put our boxes out, I went back outside about 10 minutes later and noticed that the boxes were already gone! But trash doesn’t pick up until the morning . . . So then I started to pay more attention each day as we put stuff out, and sure enough- within 10 minutes, it would be gone!
So Wednesday nights we have Care Group at our place. Jen and I had done some cleaning earlier that day and had set a box outside w/ some trash and food in it that ants had gotten into. We also had a black bag of trash from our kitchen trashcan that we put out. I then saw as our neighbor came over and took the whole box and trash bag and went into their store with it! I was so shocked!
Ok, so later our care group helped us sort through some medicine that we’d be handing out in Hilltribe Villages the next day on our project w/ the church. We took the meds out of boxes and put them into ziplock bags. Then we put all those ziplock bags into a big plastic bag. Unfortunately for us, the bag that we put the meds in looked just like the trash bag we put the empty boxes in. So when it came time for everyone to leave, we all pitched in and helped clean up like we always do. Someone does dishes, someone puts furniture back and someone takes the trash out. Jen had decided to leave the medicine on the 1st floor so we didn’t have to haul it up 2 flights of stairs, only to bring it back down at 5am the next morning. We put all the trash out, said goodnight and locked up for the night.
Well, the next morning we got ready and headed down stairs. We grabbed our helmets and all our stuff and started out to drive to church to meet everyone. And I remember thinking to myself, wow, the trash people collect trash really early here, b/c all our bags were already gone. Just as we were locking the door behind us, we remembered the medicine!! So we went back inside and Jen went to grab it. Only, it wasn’t there! We looked Everywhere downstairs! No medicine to be found! We looked up stairs- no medicine! As we were scratching our heads it occurred to us that someone must have put that bag outside thinking it was trash!! Oh man this sucks! Now what are we going to do?!? We hung our heads low and started to go back outside to leave. Then Jen says- maybe we should ask our neighbors since they seem to go through our trash! She was totally joking! Well the second the last word left her mouth, I did a 180 and headed straight for their store thinking- Genius!! Jen kept talking but I had no idea b/c I was already gone! Given that I knew only about ½ the words I would need to know to ask them about it, I knew I had to get moving since we were now running late already and who knew how long this conversation would take when I was going to have to use a lot of body language to communicate. Sure enough they were open at 6am, praise the Lord, and they were sitting in their chairs watching TV. I proceeded to ask: “last night . . .” lady- “huh?”. Ok, all in Thai, here goes: “last night”, point to curb, “bag”, point to curb, watch lady lift her eyebrows and look at me like I was speaking another language, “last night we have bag”, point to curb, “have medicine”, point to curb, “do you have it?”, look desperate. Lady- “oooooh!” She disappears into the back of the store for about 15 seconds and then comes out with our bag of medicine!!! Me in Thai- “thank you! Thank you! Thank you so much!”. At first I felt guilty for taking it from her . . . But then I thought, wait a second!! Clearly this was thrown out by mistake. Clearly this was NOT suppose to be thrown out and you should have returned it or at least asked us about it. But I took it and brought it back to Jen. She said, oh I was praying,a I was still talking and I turned around and you were gone! So after I told Jen about the whole thing, we started to think about it more . . . about the fact that they have decided to start going through our trash . . . why are they going through our trash?? The more we thought about this fact, the more weird’ed out we got! Just think about it, if someone goes through your trash, they can know almost Everything about you! They know what kind of soap we use, what kind of food we buy, they know that one of us has had a cold from all the snot-rags in there . . . I mean, it gets to be kind of creepy! Jen was like- I think I feel violated!
Well, at least one good thing came out of it! And another friend said, maybe they are going through your trash so they can start carrying the products that you buy! Hahahahaha!! Next time we go in there they are going to have a whole wall of soaps and shampoos and foods that we buy! I guess that’s one way to test your market!
So, all that to say- this week I was glad that our neighbors go through our trash!
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