Doubt

 - OR – Why I’m making my bed, littering, ironing, and other things I don’t believe in. 

I applied for this job because of beliefs. I believe in the work we’re trying to do, the types of problems we’re seeing as important. I believe in EWB as an organization, and the way we think about development. And I believe in the people involved, both from EWB and the partners we’re working with.

I’m really lucky to have a job that I believe in so much. But… (there’s always a but), there are little nagging things I do for this job that I don’t believe in.

Sort of.

1. Making my bed.

I’m sure we can all agree that sleep is important. I sleep better when my bed isn’t a total disaster, blankets are more or less in place, and it’s at least relatively clean. To meet these conditions, I would usually make my bed enough that I can sit on it and put stuff (clothes, shoes, bags, books) on it during the day, which means I’ll pull the blankets back over it while I’m not sleeping. But I don’t see much point in arranging the blankets neatly, folding pajamas, or straightening the pillow: I’m going to sleep on it again tonight and I can’t be bothered to hide the fact that I slept there last night.

Here, however, is different. At the house where I’m staying, there is a lady who comes some mornings to clean and… well, I’m not sure exactly what she does or why she comes, but that’s another story. What I do know is that if I don’t make my bed, she will. And fold my clothes, straighten the pillow, and tuck my shoes neatly perpendicular to the wall. This whole situation makes me pretty uncomfortable: someone whose job it is to clean up after me, rearrange my stuff, and do things that are “work”. We don’t share enough language to talk about it, so my tactic instead is to do these things when I wake up so she doesn’t. Instead, I sometimes leave her dirty dishes (and I’m pretty sure she re-washes any dishes I’ve washed?), she mops the floor some days, and she does a lot of opening and closing of curtains. Its not my home, and its not my place to say what she does or doesn’t do, and definitely not to take a job away from her, but I am doing a little bit to direct her attention to space which is at least a little bit more communal, and feels slightly less awkward for me.

Which is why I’m making my bed these days, straightening and smoothing the blanket over the pillow, folding pajamas, the whole bit.

2. Littering.

As best as I can tell, there is no garbage disposal system in Malawi. When you’re done with something, it gets chucked.

Around town, garbage is dropped wherever, and plastic bags float the streets like tumbleweed from old western movies. If I’m walking down the street peeling a boiled egg, its normal to leave a trail of egg shells for a couple steps. I might throw a plastic bag into the deep drainage ditches that run parallel to the roads. I’ve seen a couple metal garbage cans in some parts of Lilongwe, but it seems just as likely that garbage is thrown into these as beside them.

At home, there is a pit in the backyard where garbage goes. It’s a hole in the ground with some leaves in it, along with plastic bags, mouldy beans, milk sachets, onion peels, a peanut butter jar, the useless and annoying rubber piece I pulled off my motorcyle helmet, and everything else that gets thrown away.

On the bus, driving through a town or a forest, standard practice is to open the window, and drop the bag that held your lunch, a plastic pop bottle, orange peels, or a styrofoam take-away box out the window.

Garbage never just dissapears though. In cities, I see people sweeping the trash accumulated on the streets into piles to burn. The garbage cans are burned empty too. Behind the market in Ntcheu, there was a pile of garbage the size of a house, the closest I’ve seen here to a dump. And when the garbage pit at home gets too full, it will be burned down, plastic and all. The stuff thrown out bus windows probably doesn’t get collected, and just sits waiting the days, years, or centuries it will take to break down.

So yup, I’m throwing garbage around too. I’m still having a hard time with it, since lectures started even before kindergarten about littering being bad, and so I’m still making little compromises. In the street, I drop my egg shells or orange peels or plastic where there is a small collection of other garbage, or into the drainage ditches. When I see a garbage can, I’ll use it, but I can’t say I go out of my way (and it usually would be a very long way, and an extensive hunt) to find one. And I’ve thrown plastic bags out the bus window knowing it will get caught on a branch, ripped by the wind, built into a bird nest, and choke some tiny creature. I justify it to some extent by thinking that burning garbage is (just as bad? worse?) for the fumes of burning plastic, but I’m not really sure. Either way, I do produce garbage, and it needs to go someplace, and I can’t haul it all back to Canada to be disposed of in a sanitary, out of sight dump or recylcing/compost factory, so it goes… where I put it, or up in heavy, smelly black smoke.

3. Ironing.

I really really don’t like ironing. Hot machines that burn things (me, clothes, and potentially their own electrical cord – this last one is especially terrifying) have very few good things going for them in my mind. But being in a much more formal workplace than I’ve ever worked, and trying to present a professional image (and not come across as a dirty backpacker), wrinkled skirts, crooked shirt collars, and clothespin marks just don’t cut it. I can’t rely on steam from a hot shower to get out the worst of them, which leaves one option. I’m left taking a deep breath and plugging in an iron.

And there’s more:

Wearing shoes inside the house, little lies by omission, throwing rocks at dogs, taking self-portraits, and ripping pages out of books… but these are all stories for another day.

In all seriousness though, these are only small nagging things, like yesterday’s paper cut, and are outweighed a dozen times by the things I do that I do believe in.

I wrote this post a while ago, in June, and decided not to share it because I wasn’t sure I liked the message. Then I changed my mind. Some of the details have since changed, but the gist of it is still relevant enough.