By The Straits Times | Created at 2025-03-06 02:35:45 | Updated at 2025-03-06 09:21:28
7 hours ago
SEOUL - Imagine throwing away 26 million won (S$24,000) by accident — money you had saved for your son’s surgery. Just as you’re about to lose hope, government workers from the sanitation department step in, spending hours digging through trash to help, asking for nothing in return.
That’s exactly what happened to a woman in her 60s in the city of Sejong, South Korea.
According to city officials, a panicked call came in at around 10am on Feb 24. Civil servant Kang Hyun-kyu answered. The caller was a woman from a nearby apartment complex who explained that she had mistakenly thrown the cash in the complex’s waste disposal system.
This system, used in some residential areas in South Korea, sucks in items placed into its automated bin, much like a vacuum cleaner, and transports them through an underground pipe connected to a central waste processing station in the area.
Kang quickly took action, stopping the trash from being processed any further.
The woman rushed to the central waste processing site in her area, but her heart sank. A massive 24-ton container stood before her, packed with garbage that no longer resembled the way it was originally placed into the automated bin in her complex. The garbage had been torn from the plastic bags it was in and was all mixed together.
Just as she was about to give up, sanitation workers, touched by her story, offered to help.
“I felt hopeless when I saw all that trash,” she later wrote in a post on the Sejong City government website. “But the workers kept searching. They carefully picked out each bill.”
Determined to find as much money as possible, the city workers spread the trash out and searched through it — piece by piece.
Then, one worker shouted that he had found a 50,000 won bill. Moments later, another found several 10,000 won bills. Encouraged, they kept going.
For eight hours, they searched through the trash. In the end, they recovered 18.28 million won. The rest, officials said, was likely lost or destroyed.
Despite their hard work, the workers refused any reward. Instead, they even apologized for not finding all the money, according to the women’s post on the city government website.
“I was so overwhelmed with gratitude that I cried,” she wrote. THE KOREA HERALD/ASIA NEWS NETWORK
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