Well, not really. At best,  you can hope for “out of sight, out of mind”, and then we have the oddity that is the above picture.

Rural Thai households are probably among the cleanest in the world. The floors are either concrete, tile or smooth teak and they are swept as much as three times a day. Unfortunately,  for the most part,  they are swept just outside the front porch and the remnants are left where they lay. Occasionally they are gathered into a pile and burned, occasionally.

At my girls family house in Mukdahan this is pretty much the case. Things are allowed to collect around the outside of the house and eventually they are gathered up and burned by the side of the house. Plastic bottles, candy wrappers, milk cartons and anything else you can think of. The process definitely goes against all reason.

And then you have the pit at the rear of the property. This pit is roughly four feet in diameter and at least 3 feet deep. The pit is filled with plastic bags, the kind used for takeout from the market. You would get chicken skewers in them or maybe sticky rice. There are at least a thousand or more plastic bags in this pit and still room for more.

Now, What the hell is this all about? I’d love to tell you but I have no clue. As I said before,  and as the pictures show,  trash is left to accumulate and then burned. So what is the purpose of the pit and thousands of plastic food bags?

I suppose there is a possibility that these bags would draw unwelcome guests due to lingering food smells but it seems to me that the bags have been cleaned before they were deposited here. The pit has also been open for some time and there is no apparent animal activity around it.

Perhaps I have stumbled upon the black hole of plastic food bags and I should count myself lucky that I wasn’t sucked in and transmuted into leftover tadpole guts or ant larvae. Or worse yet,  a plastic bag with no apparent purpose in a pit.

If you think about it these bags must be lethal in some way. Why else would someone dig a pit specifically for these bags and no other trash? It could be a trap to lure in idiot falang such as myself. I can hear the family now…” young brother go dig a pit and put all the plastic bags you can find in it, I bet the falang will find it within an hour and start taking pictures”. This is probably the best possibility.

I’m sure you are wondering why I didn’t just ask what the pit was for? I did, and the answer was much more convoluted than I could ever possibly hope to go into here. I walked away from this knowing that the pit was important and that’s all the falang needed to know.

What I do know is that the pit was scheduled to be closed soon after I took the picture and buried with the bags would be all my unanswered questions. The only good to come of it all would be the green patch of grass growing over the once plastic void. It might be a while before anything else goes green around these parts.

So, what do you think?