Ok, so Mom asked me to write her next post; she wants y’all to hear my definition and experience of what I thought was “hard work” while living overseas.
As a child my definition was naturally a little different from an adult’s would be. I was too young and immature to grasp all the reasoning behind the racist (and usually vile) remarks the other children, and sometimes even adults, threw at my siblings and I. I just knew that I wasn’t accepted; because I didn’t speak their language, because I dressed differently, because I was blond. Within the first few months, I’d grown a thicker skin and had learned to ignore such remarks and insults. It got 100 times thicker when I went to school. I made exactly one friend who told me to sit in the far back to avoid getting pranked, which was nice.
Years later, when I was finally ‘big’ (for those of you who don’t know, I’m a whopping 5’1” and 95 lbs.) and stronger, Andrew left for school. So his responsibilities of helping Dad around the house fell mostly to me. Fixing his car in -30* weather is cold to the hands. C-c-can’t h-hold a b-bolt with m-m-mittens. Every year when the heat was turned on, we had to check the hot water pipes that ran through each room to look of leaks. Three was the usual number: two minor and one major. Did you know that all it takes to fix a leaky hot water pipe is ONLY Epoxy if you’re lucky? If you’re UNlucky, it’ll take one cheap shoe, a little bit of an old inner tube, a one tenge coin, one hefty hose clamp, and a couple of rivers of rusty water in the face.
Not all the hard work pertained to fixing things. Some of it resulted from things that just would not fix. Toilets for example. Not cool when they don’t fix fast. Or how about Washing Machines?! I bet you take yours for granted. I’d even bet yours works 98% of the time too, and if it does break it can be fixed in a few days. 7 people make a lot of laundry that needs doing by hand. And perish the thought of a dryer. I didn’t even know how to use one till a year ago, that’s how absolutely absent they were. Vacuum cleaners are in the same category as washing machines. We didn’t have one that worked till two or so years before our time was up. The heavy rugs had to be rolled up and carted outside to where they were beaten with sticks or a rug beater. They were heavy and showered a cascade of dirt and sand in your face when you hung them up.
Some of the hardest work in a dessert is sleeping. Yes, even SLEEPING is hard. In the summer the house kindly cools down to 95*, and then it stays at 95* (again, IF you’re lucky) till 2am, and if you don’t wanna wake up as a raisin, you’d better be covered with at least a sheet to keep the ‘skeeters away (we didn’t usually have bug spray or nets). The house was so well insulated that it didn’t cool down like the outside did. It wasn’t unusual to go camping in the summer and wake up to a frost, so who wants to sleep outside? If it wasn’t hot, then the wild dogs came out in their usual packs and made the usual nightly noises. Sometimes there would be so many running past our house that in the morning we’d go outside and look in the dust around our property and see nothing in it except pooch prints.
The worst of the worst was none of the above mentioned. Not by a long shot. It was a combination of the heat, the nasty smells (which I didn’t mention), the fixing thingamajigs, and the toilet. Yeah, the septic line got clogged. Lovely right? Not only did it get clogged, but it also got clogged for the second time! Only I don’t really remember the first time, I was just a little too busy with a body that was recovering from a 30 hour travel period, (full of pain stemming from a triple whammy of strep throat, a sinus infection, and ear infections – NEVER fly with ear infections.), and a throat that was clogging up in a more alarming way over some meds for an allergic reaction to a vaccine. So I was mercifully excused from the first sewage spree. The second time, however, happened on a blistering hot day, and I was unmercifully un-sick. We dug up the pipe, took a look, and pulled out our tools, which were:
• A water pump that belonged to Dad’s NGO
• Two Rubbermaid tubs that were full of water
• A half flat basketball
• Some plastic bags
• Cement mix
• Anti-sissy-ness
These tools were for:
• Pushing the clog out, if possible.
• For the pump propel into the persnickety pipe (these tubs needed to be refilled as this went on).
• To shove partway down the toilet and have your littlest sister stand on to prevent back-flow.
• These were mostly unused, but their intended purpose was as a sub for rubber gloves.
• To fix a mega-sized leak before pumping.
• To reach into the pipe and pull out the clog. (For real)
Having insults thrown at you every time you step outside is frustrating. Working outside in constantly extreme weather is wearing. Fixing eternally leaking pipes so you can stay warm gets old outrageously fast. Being unable to sleep for six continuous months out of the year is, well, tiring. Fixing sewage is callously hard work. Have I adequately defined the term “Hard Work” for you?
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