A woman in South Korea who accidentally misplaced her money meant for her son’s surgery managed to partially recover it with the help of government sanitation workers.
The painstaking search for the cash took eight hours.
“I was so overwhelmed with gratitude that I cried,” she was quoted as saying from The Korea Herald, citing the Sejong city government website.
On February 24 at around 10am, a civil servant got a call from an elderly woman living in an apartment complex in Sejong, who was in a state of alarm after finding out she accidentally threw away 26 million won (approximately RM79,334) into the apartment’s waste disposal system.
The waste disposal system functions by sucking the items placed into an automated bin, akin to a vacuum cleaner and funnels the waste through an underground pipe connected to a waste processing station.
Realising the urgency of the situation, the civil servant swiftly took action and managed to stop the trash that day from being processed any further.
After that, the 60-year-old woman rushed to the waste processing station near her apartment but was faced with a 24-tonne container of waste before her. Her heart sank at the sight of garbage piled atop one another.
She was about to throw in the towel and accept her loss but some sanitation workers stepped up and decided to help after they heard her story.
“I felt hopeless when I saw all that trash.
“But the workers kept searching. They carefully picked out each bill,” she was quoted as saying.
The sanitation workers were determined to return the woman’s money by spreading out the trash piece-by-piece and searching through it.
Later, one worker revealed that he found a 50,000 won bill. Afterwards, another worker managed to find several 10,000 won bills, further encouraging the others to search for more bills.
The sanitation workers searched through the trash for eight hours and recovered 18.28 million won (approximately RM55,839). It was believed that the rest of the cash was either missing or destroyed.
Despite their hard work and dedication to recovering the elderly woman’s cash, the sanitation workers refused any reward and even apologised for not finding the full amount, the woman said on the Sejong city’s government website.
