For my social service during vacations I chose to help in a Tamarindo trash can cleaning project, which consisted of a classmate and me, would go to Tamarindo, dump, wash 8 trash cans spread throughout the zone, and get rid of stickers that had been covering traffic signs. In the first weeks, this would take hours to finish especially the trash can part because of the heaviness most of them had and the fact that we would have to pull water from places far from where the trash cans were (forgot to mention that majority of them were chained to a pole or plants) and that was quite time-consuming as the weeks started passing we started thinking of different more efficient ways to pull the bags out, and after a few ripped bags and failed attempts we came up with two ways of pulling them out one of them was in case the trash can was way too full. What would happen is that in the first weeks we would try to flip the trashcan sideways and then attempt to close the bag and pull it which would in most cases either rip the bag or result in more trash to be under the bags so we came up with putting another bag on top of the trash can flipping it sideways and this time one of us (mostly me) would lift it from the back and the other would hold the bag so that the weight of the trash wouldn't make the bag slip off and spill part of it, I would lift the trash can up and shake it making the whole inner bag get in the outer bag holding all the trash together that way avoiding anything from spilling out even if the inside bag was ripped. The other solution we found was that as seen in the image I’m pulling a transparent bag, we would put two bags instead of one by doing this sometimes during the days we were not there somebody else would pull out the black bag first and when we arrived the white one would either have a smaller black one inside or was full this helped us pull out the bag due to it being lighter and also keep the trash cans cleaner and easier to wash. Now, what I less liked about this was the washing of the trash cans because we would have to be constantly pulling water in small buckets, washing one trash can would take from 4 to 6 buckets of water in other words I would have to go walk to the water faucet fill the bucket and walk back which was way too inefficient in my opinion but we couldn't do much about it, the other part of the project as I already mentioned was basically clearing some of the street signs which difficulty varied based on how long and what type of stickers they were, we started with chemical-based Goo Gone but afterward we started using a naturally made version that way we wouldn't be spraying chemicals on plants and shops near the signs. Doing this and seeing what people threw away really made me think about the unjust way some of the high-income people make use of their money, we would see styrofoam food containers full of food and think about how most likely this is someone who well, can afford to throw away food while on the other side there are people who might end up going to sleep with an empty stomach, and how during the pandemic we were able to see this even more although everyone was impacted in a way or another, all this made me think about that there is no possible way that I can complain about my situation during the pandemic and in any case that I think about complaining I remember about these thoughts which guide me to be a more grateful person.
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