Saturday, January 24, 2009

The Lesson of Hard Work

When I first arrived, the Hermana (mother) of the home explained to me my chores. Nothing major, so it was fine.

Then the other night, Saymi (one of my roomates) came in and said to me in her slowest Spanish possible that we needed to clean the stove. "¿Ahorra?" I asked, (one of the phrases I have mastered). "Sí" So we were off.

I looked at the estufa and thought to myself, Well, this will be easy. The stove was so dirty that cleaning it wouldn't do anything so if we just rubbed it for a decent amount of time, we could be done. How very wrong I was.

We scrubbed that thing for at least half an hour. Honestly, I saw no difference, except for the fact that my fingernails were stained black for the next three days. Lessons learned:
1) Sometimes cleaning isn't for the sake of the beautifying or the improvement of the object being cleaned. Sometimes you just have to clean for the sake of cleaning. And even if you don't notice a difference, at least you got the job done.
2) Sweat washes away tears.

No comments:

Post a Comment