When
I took trips to Nicaragua as a volunteer with Bridges to Community during high school, I distinctly
remember finding it amusing that the Nicaraguan masons with whom we worked would
always rinse the cement off their boots at the end of the day. As a teenager participating in a weeklong,
adventurous service learning trip in what I perceived at the time as an exotic
country, I prided myself on being dirty at the end of each day. There was something liberating about getting
absolutely filthy and not giving a damn about it. Not to mention, how dirty you got was
considered to be an indisputable measurement of how hard you had worked. Why would I ever want to wash away the
evidence of my obviously superior cement mixing skills?
Well,
I still find a certain sense of satisfaction in working and sweating until I am
abominably filthy, but I found out the hard way that there is a very practical
reason why Nicaraguans rinse their boots off at the end of a day on the
construction site. After a couple months
of working full time with Bridges, I discovered that cement literally eats away
at fabric, leather, and rubber if you don’t clean it off your clothing and
shoes before it dries. My trusty L.L. Bean work boots soon had gaping holes in them, and the rubber soles gradually
detached themselves and began to flop around as I walked.
Eventually I had to discard my well-loved boots and acquire a new
pair. After that, I followed the masons’
example and diligently rinsed off my boots at the end of each day.
The
trouble with washing off your boots is that the water on our worksites was
usually stored in huge, chest-high metal barrels. Ok, so maybe they were waist-high for those
who are not vertically challenged. But
regardless, they were high enough that using your hands to splash enough water
onto your boots to clean them properly without going through the arduous ordeal
of taking them off was always a bit of a challenge.
So one afternoon when we had just finished mixing a massive batch of
cement, I found myself wandering around the worksite looking for a small bowl of
some sort that I could use to scoop water onto my feet.
An
elderly woman who lived next door in what could tactfully be described as a
humble home took note of my aimless wandering and asked me what I was looking
for. She was one of those women whose face
had been so weathered by the sun and body so ravaged by years of scrubbing
clothes and carrying firewood that it was impossible to tell whether she was
sixty or eighty five. Nonetheless, her
appearance was pristine. She wore a
conservative blouse, an immaculate white skirt, and her hair was twisted into a
knot on the back of her head. She
hobbled slowly into her home, emerged with a small plastic dish, and proceeded
to fill it with water for me.
As
I reached out to take the dish from her, I was first confused and then dismayed
as instead of passing it to me she knelt down in the mud and cement at my
feet. Despite my fervent protests and a
few meek attempts to take the the bowl, she proceeded to wash my boots
meticulously. She wiped mud from the
rubber soles, scraped cement out from under the laces, and then carefully
rinsed off any remaining traces of grime.
I was utterly at a loss as to how to react to this act that to her must
have seemed like a basic act of civility, but to me felt like a manifestation
of the fundamentally unacceptable imbalance of power in this world. So once she had finished devotedly washing my
boots I just said thank you. She smiled,
nodded, and shuffled back into her house.
