「故事·听力」I Dedicated My Life To Garbage
I Dedicated My Life To Garbage
This is Nicole. Her parents and friends call her Nikky, and they think that she has taken on too much for one person to cope with. But she hopes that when you listen to her story, you’ll understand her.
Right from her early childhood, Nicole’s parents taught her to set her priorities correctly, and to not waste time on the little things. You might think that this made her unreliable or indifferent, but this isn’t true. It’s just that all the little things have to be done fast, sort of automatically. That's why at home they never argued about who would take out the trash – it was always her. Every evening she'd take the trash bag to the roadside to be picked up by a garbage truck. That’s what she always did, even when the garbage bag looked almost the same size as her. A couple of minutes, and it's done and forgotten!
Nicole’s parents also think that, sometimes, it's a really good idea to take a break, relax, and just do absolutely nothing. This is why every year they go to a beach hotel and spend time enjoying sweet laziness. Last summer, they went to Bali. Their hotel there was gorgeous! It seemed that whatever they wanted was available to them at the very moment they wanted it! And everything around them was so beautiful, clean, and luxurious! She even noticed the hotel staff raking the sand at the beach.
The final evening of their vacation made her so sad; she just didn't want to leave. She left her parents with their cocktails near the pool and went to the beach, watching the waves lapping at her feet. She walked and walked and walked, up until the point when she reached the end of the beach. Of course, the beach hadn’t literally disappeared, it was just that she saw a high wall in front of her, with one end going right into the ocean – the hotel territory was fenced off. Just as she was about to turn back, she noticed a hole in the wall…and then she became curious – what would she find on the other side? Maybe another hotel, even better than theirs? She decided to take a look.
When she crawled through the hole, at first she didn't realize where she was. She just walked on the warm clean sand, and the wind carried the smell of flowers and the tender whisper of the palm trees. And then she found herself standing on...a GARBAGE DUMP?!
There it was – the line of the beach, as far she could see, was covered with piles of garbage, and a few people were wandering around with sticks and bags. It all looked like a scene from some post-apocalyptic movie. She was so shocked that she didn’t notice right away that trash covered not only the beach, but also the ocean, floating many meters into the distance. So that's why the fence was built so deep into the water!
Nicole went back to the hotel, and the next morning they flew back home. But she still couldn't unsee what she had seen. And when she finally got access to her laptop, she spent almost all night reading articles about garbage in the oceans.
She was devastated by what she learned. She read about the “garbage continent” floating in the ocean, with an area exceeding the size of the state of Texas and which was continuously growing. Yes, you heard that right – A MILLION square kilometers of water, covered with “plastic soup”, where the ocean’s inhabitants are dying in pain on a daily basis. In other places, the plastic garbage was not as dense, but there was still so much of it...TOO much of it! What she saw in Bali was garbage that was brought back to the shore from the ocean. If the expensive hotels didn't clean their beaches they would have looked exactly the same!
She tried to remember what she had seen there, and realized that the kind of garbage found in the oceans was something she threw out regularly. Plastic bottles of all sizes and colors, plastic bags, packaging – everything that she’d dropped by the side of the road for years! She already knew that the garbage could be sorted out so that the paper, plastic, and glass could be disposed of separately for recycling, and it could be done for free. But her family is pretty wealthy, so they can pay for the disposal of all their garbage without spending precious time on sorting it or on trying to get money back for empty cans and bottles. You just throw it out and forget about it…that's how she’d always seen it!
It was late at night, but she found herself wandering around her house, looking at so many things with new eyes. There were so many plastic bottles in the bathroom – and when the shampoo or liquid soap ran out, they would go in the garbage bag. And the plastic clothing covers from the dry cleaner’s – Nicole was fond of hanging up clean, pleasant smelling clothing in her walk-in closet...