What a load of rubbish!

When I first moved here, there used to be very regular refuse collections. Each street has several large yellow communal wheelie bins, and a lorry used to come around at all random hours of the day and night to empty them. (Do not imagine a modern, mechanised refuse-collection vehicle. This is a large open truck with rubbish piled precariously high and the men who collect the rubbish perched even more precariously on top of the pile. No gloves, masks or any sort of protection against the filth and stench. This is the sort of job that goes to the migrant workers here...)
As well as the official collections, enterprising individuals on bicycles with huge panniers/sacks attached at either side would come and dig through the bins for anything that could be usefully recycled.
Some months ago, the regular collections inexplicably ceased; instead of the bins being emptied more than once a day, we were lucky if the lorry appeared a couple of times in the month. The result: the bins rapidly overflowed, and then people simply threw their bags of rubbish on the floor in the vague vicinity of the bins. On the rare occasions that the lorry came around, the bins would be emptied, but the rubbish on the floor was simply left there - rich pickings for the street dogs.
Someone on our street had the bright idea of removing the bins from where they were (right in front of people's houses) to a patch of wasteland at the end of the road where there are no houses, so at least the growing pile of rubbish was not in front of anyone's front gate. However, old habits die hard, and I found that for weeks after the bins had been removed people were still randomly throwing bags of rubbish outside my front wall where, for a short time, a bin had stood! After getting sick of having to clear it up and haul it off down the road to the new bin location, I finally put up some notices in Burmese, Thai and English requesting people not to throw their rubbish there.

 

It took a few weeks, but eventually the majority of the dumping stopped. (All I need now is another notice for the dogs, kindly requesting them not to leave their generous donations outside my front gate!)

Sadly, after months of irregular collections, the new location of the bins has come to resemble a rubbish tip, as none of the excess rubbish has been cleared.

In the rainy season, this patch of land becomes completely waterlogged and turns into a lake. I hate to think what it will be like then, with all the plastic bags floating around and the contents slowly beginning to rot...
One more thing I will not miss when I leave, together with the dogs, the cockerel, the erratic water supply and the crazy drivers!