Ryan's been finishing a book proposal and I've been working on coordinating a cultural event we are calling 'The Question of America' and a number of other workshops in addition to the regular classes I'm teaching. Whenever we get overwhelmed with work we tend to let the housekeeping go a bit, and let's just say it is getting a little Grey Gardens in here. I wanted to do a post on cleaning because the tools and systems in our apartment have just enough examples to illustrate how what is 'normal' for one person in a culture, is so alien to another from a different culture. It simply reinforces how our notions of how something should work, what it should look like, and what is 'normal' are so shaped by the context into which we are born. I'm reminded of the late and wonderfully inspiring teacher from the Comparative History of Ideas department Jim Clowes and something he shared in a lecture. At Christmas his mother always served a ham cut into slices and placed in a certain dish. It wasn't until he attended a meal at another home that he saw a whole ham. He didn't even know it was ham. When he mentioned it to his mother she said she always served it like that because she didn't have a large enough dish to serve it another way. His ham worldview was blown apart.
Now we aren't seeing a lot of ham in these parts, but we have approached some of the aspects of living in Morocco with Jim Clowes' hammy wonder. I'll give you a little tour of all the chores today that have become automatic now that we have been here almost 3 months! At first we approached using this stuff as if we were operating delicate equipment that maybe contained some type of mercury that could be released if not handled carefully. Now we can slam everything around with comfortable familiarity!
I give you...the washing machine. Imagine a dorm refrigerator that is 4 feet tall.
Then you pour soap in a little chute next to the trap doors, close it up and set it to 90 or 60 minutes. Then your clothes do a hamster wheel rotation off and on until the machine starts shaking horribly and you know it is about done!
Another major adaptation is our use of gas. These big tanks fuel our hot water and another one in the kitchen fuels the stove. We have to have our security guy, Mohammed, help us wheel out the empty ones and get new ones every few weeks. We are not gas people. I love to cook with gas, but we have to light the flame OURSELVES here! It's scary. The only comfort I have when we light off a huge mushroom cloud on the stove top every once in a while is this can't be THAT dangerous, right? Humans would be burning down apartment buildings constantly....right?!
To get the hot water going for the kitchen or bathroom you have to open the valve, and then push the igniter on this box attached to the wall. When hot water is being heated the little window lights up from the mini furnace inside. To think there was a time when I would linger in a hot shower. If you do that here, you end up with conditioner half rinsed from your hair, a cold reminder that you were lingering!
One of our cleaning tools that puzzled us was the mop. It is part mop, part squeegee. It didn't really fit in the mop bucket, so we would splash water on the ground and then move it around a little. We had a supply of wide thick cotton rags, but we thought they were simply for general cleaning. One day I was in a bookstore and because it had just rained, patrons kept tromping in mud and water. A cleaning lady was tasked with mopping it up and she had this amazingly effective technique AND she had the thick cotton towels! The wide mop head is used for swiping the towels across the floor! First a wet one, then a dry one, and it is incredibly useful! Far superior to the American style mop as you can cover a lot of ground with your swoopy motions. See...observing the locals teaches so much about how things are done!
Now that the laundry is done, the floors are mopped, and the dishes clean, I think I will bake a chocolate cake and destroy everything again!