A volunteer's rest days

After 6 months in India, struggling to keep going working a 6 day week while looking after my home, walking everywhere to get to work and do my shopping, doing all my washing by hand I realised I was getting completely exhausted.  I spoke to my manager, asking if we could talk about reducing the number of Saturdays worked, expecting to compromise with having every 3rd or 4th Saturday off but he said straight away, stop working Saturdays.  Hurrah!  (and thank you).

Last weekend was my first Saturday off when we went to Vizag, something I'd been thinking about doing for a long time and would have taken a day of leave to achieve.  This weekend was my first full weekend at home.  So what did I do?  I crawled out of bed on Saturday morning feeling dreadful, staggered around the house for the morning, forcing myself to eat some breakfast before giving up and going back to bed late morning.  Which is where I stayed for most of the day, just getting up late afternoon to make a cup of tea and decide I couldn't face cooking any dinner.  A couple of hours of sitting up in the evening was enough to finish me off and send me back to bed where I managed to get around 8 hours sleep.  That must be the first time I've slept that long for about 30 years!

At least I managed to do one of my intended jobs on Saturday morning and defrosted and cleaned my fridge before retiring to bed.  The daily (sometimes several times a day) power cuts had left the ice box with thick layers of ice making it impossible to put anything into it and reducing the efficiency of the fridge.  At least the relative warmth here made it quite quick to defrost and wipe clean.

Sunday seemed a much better day after a good sleep and I walked into the market to do some shopping although much slower than usual.  I then decided that I would do one of the other jobs I had on my list for the weekend and wash the floors.  I have given them all a fairly regular mopping down with string mop dipped in a bucket but this usually has the effect of swilling dirty water around and spreading the dirt.  This time I was going to wash them down the Indian way.  All the floors are solid with drainage holes in various places at floor level.  This means that you can give them a good dousing down with water and just sweep the water all over the floor and towards the drains.  I lifted all the mats and furniture and put them outside out of the way

I don't have a hosepipe so had to fill buckets with water in the shower and carry them through to chuck over the floors.  The water turned an alarming shade of orange with the soil and dust residues that had accumulated staining it but it got gradually better as I threw more buckets of water over the floors and swished it around a bit.  The tricky bit was steering the water towards the drains as the gradient of the floors isn't ideal.  I then found that one of the drains didn't go outside but into the Puja room, now used as a store room and filled with various bags of things left behind by another VSO volunteer.  I opened the door to see what it was like and found a couple of inches of water had accumuted in their, swilling around the bags on the floor.  This was not quite what I'd intended. I fished the bags out of the water, put them on shelves to drip dry and tried to sweep the water back out of that room and towards the other drain at the front of the house.

I heard lots of giggles and squeals of laughter and looked out to see the 6 women who are working on the building site next door standing on the wall gazing into my house in fascination, seeming to take great delight in watching me wandering around in bare feet with the legs of my salwar rolled up out of the water, bending down with my broom trying to persuade the water that it really did want to go outside.  I'd love to know how they can work all day doing really heavy, dirty work while continuing to look beautiful and elegant in their saris with not a hair out of place while I ended up hot and sweaty, filthy and with my hair all over the place.  They clearly have a talent that I lack.

After that job I had to have a shower and wash my clothes, deciding to leave washing the other half of the house until next week.  The thing is, I know the floors are clean but they don't look any different.