My life - Part 32

When I was 15 or 16, our class managed to become the dirtiest class room in the entire school, I have no idea how or why. The punishment for that was that the entire class had to clean the entire school, so we changed into our physical education attire (shorts and t-shirt - my favourite attire ever!) and went around the school compound picking up rubbish, sweeping and mopping floors, cleaning the school canteen, etc. There was a drain that was clogged up with rubbish, dirt and all sorts of icky yucky gooey disgusting stuff, and our class teacher told us to clean it out, and this required us to go into the drain and get this disgusting stuff out of the drain with our hands, before we can sweep the rest of the stuff away. I told the teacher that no way I was going to use my bare hands to get the stuff out, and the teacher told me, "Sheila, there is nothing that soap cannot clean." Remember I had a temper back then, and for whatever reason I got angry at this remark, so I got into the drain, grabbed a bunch of that disgusting stuff, climbed out of the drain and rubbed the stuff over the teacher's arm. She of course shrieked and asked me what I was doing, and I told her, "Teacher, there is nothing that soap cannot clean!" Needless to say I spent the rest of the day at the principal's office, I can't remember whether this was another occasion that required my father's attendance, but at least I managed to get out of cleaning the damn school.

I tell this story because now that I'm travelling, I am staying in all kinds of strange places, sometimes they are not the cleanest places in the world, sometimes I have a shared bathroom, sometimes I wear the same clothes for 3 days, sometimes I wash my hair after 4 days - all things that I never thought possible. Not that I am a princess or anything, but my mother was, and still is, OCD about neatness and cleanliness, and while I will never be able to reach her standards, I have come to appreciate cleanliness so that I never thought I could actually use a shared bathroom, for example. I don't even shower in my gym for this reason, I cannot bear to walk bare foot in a place where I do not know who has done what before. 

So how am I coping? 2 things. The first is that I don't have very good eye sight (just the other day I remarked to a fellow traveller that there were some people up a distant hill, and he told me that that was not people, that was a cow. And this is when I had my spectacles on!) and I don't wear my spectacles in the shower, so everything is a blur and I cannot see how dirty the bathroom really is. The second is that when I have to use something that I don't think is clean, or when I have to wear the same clothes for days, or I can't shower or wash my hair when I would like to, I always remember what my teacher said all those years ago - "Sheila, there is nothing that soap cannot clean" - and then I feel better because I know I can be clean again, all I need is soap!