Dirt

In the early 90s, a woman I know moved to Zambia. (She had to crate four years' worth of toilet paper to take with her, making her journey quite memorable to me.) When she got to Zambia she wrote some newsletters and talked about how it was so much dirtier there than in the USA. This, I could not believe.

I grew up in west Texas where dust storms guaranteed that no one who loved dusting furniture would ever be disappointed for lack of work. Yet I still wondered how anywhere in the world could really be much dirtier than anywhere else.

Then I moved to the Middle Kingdom. And now I know.

When I lived in Bedrock, approximately once a year the sky would be clear and blue. I remember one year it happened in August. People called their friends to rave about the beautiful weather and to make sure their friends hadn't missed seeing it.

The rest of the time, the air was filled with soot. Burning coal served as the main source of energy. A smokestack from the college faculty dining hall pumped black stuff towards my unsealed apartment windows. The water supply was not clean, the streets were covered with inches of thick dust (especially along the edges), and the millions of people who lived there had no place to throw their garbage because no public waste bins were available. Mold grew on and in most buildings. Trash in my building was burned in the chute where it resided, attached to my stairwell. 

(For a refresher of what my first apartment in the Middle Kingdom looked like, check out this post.)

A young local teacher at the university was riding in a van through town with me one day. She breathed in the horrendous exhaust of the traffic, sighed, and said she loved the smell, as it reminded her of her growing up years.

American visitors to Bedrock often commented on the black layer of soot on the insides of their nostrils. 

Ponds and rivers were filled with rotted garbage. I vowed not to eat fish, as I had no way of knowing if my fish had come from such a polluted place.

When I mopped my tile floor or wiped down my furniture, it would be covered in sticky dirt/gunk/coal residue again within half an hour. If I wanted a clean house, it would be a full time job -- I would have no time for teaching or making friends or studying the language. So I learned to live with a little dirt. But the need and desire to clean got overwhelming at times.

So I did something I never thought I would do. I hired a village woman to come clean my house once a week for three hours. At first, I really detested the idea of having a maid-type helper. I feared the locals would think I was too good to clean house, that I thought I was richer and better and of a higher class than them. It would hurt if they thought that, and in fact I do not think I am better than them.

So when the village woman came, I would work alongside her, and within those three hours we would both work non-stop. 

The house would not stay clean for a whole week. I still had to clean it almost every day. But once a week it got really clean, and it was a relief that not everything that got done depended solely on me. 

It cost me $5 per week, and that money allowed the woman to send her two children to junior high and high school, and it allowed them to eat nutritious food. It pulled her out of poverty, and to this day she is one of the most financially stable in her village. I know because I still talk to her on the phone and visit her village when I can, and she has even come to Bamboo Forest to visit me! No one ever had a bad thought about my helper arrangement, because it turns out that no one ever really knew about it. Her previous job was to dig recyclables out of mounds of trash, so she definitely found it as a step up in the work force to do housework.

Now, in Bamboo Forest, I have another helper. Due to the horrendous exchange rate the USD dollar gets here*, the price I pay is higher at $11 per 3-hour stint. Bamboo Forest is one of the most beautiful and clean cities in the nation (now that the  subway construction is completed). It still gets dirtier here than it does in America though, for whatever reasons.

I'm glad to report that the horrible air pollution in Bedrock, which I think had to certainly be among the worst of anywhere in the entire world, improved dramatically around 2004. Newcomers still complained about it, but if they had known what it was before, they would have just shut up.

Lo and behold, I went to India in 2010. It's a bit worse there, so now I have shut up too!

__________________________________________________________________

*When the politicians in the USA complain about the exchange rate with China, they are helping big business who speculate on currency exchanges and helping themselves, but they are HURTING PEOPLE LIKE ME. Don't let 'em fool ya.