This weekend I spied that the neighbors put their big green trash bin out and their blue bin was overflowing with trash in bags. For those of you who don’t know, the blue bin is for recycling. Also we don’t have trash pick up on the weekends.
This is where I became the buttinsky neighbor. I took the trash bag on top and threw it into one of the other neighbor’s not-so-full trash cans. Then I grabbed a brochure from DPW I had stuck to the fridge and walked over to the recycling offender’s house. I knocked on the door and the kids answered. I said that the city wasn’t collecting trash that day and they won’t take trash from the recycling cans. I got a wide-eyed saucer look and they yelled something back to their mom in the rear of the house. Mom came to the front, I tried to explain myself and then handed her the brochure.
I should mention, Mom does not speak English. Or Spanish, that other great American language. I’m not really sure if the kids speak English either. Dad speaks perfect English, however, Dad wasn’t home.
Also this is not the first time I have made attempts to explain the trash/ recycling system to the family. When they first moved in their trash can never got to the curb. They would fill it. But it never moved to the spot where the garbage men would take it. I mentioned it to the son, but he just smiled and nodded. It still did not move until I moved it. Once that was done, they figured it out.
I have no idea what language the family speaks. I understand that their native land is diverse with several ethnic groups and a couple of languages…. Well that’s what I sort of remember from a speech given at some street fair in Adams Morgan.
The DPW brochure has a bunch of big pictures showing what kinds of materials go into the blue bin. Hopefully, this will help in my evil plan to impose my western recycling values. Next, imposing my anti-littering values on the native population.