Under a shed, under some trees, in an old fairground, lying on her side was an old dustbin. She had been left lying there after someone had turned the fairground into a parking lot when people stopped coming to the fair. However, Bola Rina (yes, that was her name) was no ordinary dustbin... Bola Rina was a dustbin who liked to eat garbage. Many people think this means the same thing as liking garbage, but no, the opposite was true. Bola Rina rather disliked rubbish of all sorts—when it was in the wrong place. She was always with General Cleaner and they usually sang together as they kept the fairground clean!
When she was upright, Bola Rina used to fit right into the show. From where she normally sat, you could see the main attraction of the fairground, which was a huge carousel wheel. Between two strong upright metal posts spun a wheel formed by a rim made up of two rings and a double-row of metal spokes, like a huge double-layered spider-web.
There were yellow plastic seats arranged in rows in swinging metal buckets that swung freely between the two spidery bluish-metal rings, and everyone enjoyed sitting and being slowly lifted from the ground, upward and forward. Then at the very top of the wheel, you could see almost all of Koklokrom for a short time, until you were pulled backwards and down, down, to the ground again.
Everyone used to enjoy going on the ride, eating and chatting with their friends in the carousel seats, and it was even nicer when you had some popcorn or something else to peck at.
After coming off the ride, people loved to stand around the wheel and watch other people go wheeling over their heads, and enjoy the thought of being up that high! Some too would just walk about the green patch that the carousel-wheel sat on, finishing their popcorn or whatever else they were pecking at.
All this was very fine and nice to see, and Bola Rina sometimes wished she could also go up so high! But no, she was a big round dustbin, who would not fit into the seats … So, she was content to just be a very good dustbin, and she was very good at being a dustbin. She had this trick of opening her lid and banging it to attract attention just when people were about to throw their rubbish onto the ground. Most people would stop in the act of littering and walk over to Bola Rina and put the rubbish in the right place: into the Bola! Everyone thought the clattering she made with her lid was by some interesting mechanism that made her open and close her mouth to make that rubbish-rescuing noise. They could not even imagine the truth: Bola was alive!
It was kind of interesting for Bola Rina to watch how different people dealt with rubbish. Bola had heard one litter-bug tell another "wow you really like rubbish" but that it is different. What they really liked was creating rubbish which is not the same thing as liking rubbish.