Genevieve Hawkins
Jul 10, 2017 · 1 min read

Some years ago I lived in a totally off grid area in Thailand with my husband. Off grid as in, no government services. No mail. No water. No electric. No roads. Everything you wanted to do there, work it out yourself. We found workarounds for most things not too hard: satellite internet was the first, water was well pump. Electric and mail got rerouted from a neighbor’s line with the bill worked out every month. Our dirt plus stone roads were bad in rain, impassable in monsoon. The service I missed most? Trash pickup. Really burying stuff is tiring and animals dig it up, burning stuff will give you a headache with plastics involved, and every day just eating or drinking or sanitary waste or you name it, it added up in mind blowing time. Had to drive a plastic bag of waste into town every day and discretely dump it into a 7 Eleven dumpster…hug your trash man. That is the service that things go to bust the quickest over…