You make a mess you clean it up!

First of all, there are no janitors at our school, The cleaning is just on us. Every day, from 2:50pm to 3:10pm is what’s called “cleaning time” for the whole school, everyone has a cleaning job, and we work in groups, when it’s cleaning time we do it. For example, I work with these two other really nice girls, and our first cleaning job was sweeping leaves on the first floor. After we did that for a month or two, then we were assigned to cleaning the bathroom - that was brutal! Then after a while, we were the people to dump the trash - that was also pretty disgusting.

Sweeping leaves was okay, because you are just sweeping nature, we also used these super cool brooms made out of real twigs, and you don’t have to smell poop or trash. Cleaning the bathroom was just plain gross, when we first got the job I realized that the scrub for the toilet that people poop and pee in, and the scrub that is used for the sink that we wash our hands in, looks exactly the same!!! And you know what that means? It means that it’s extremely possible that when we are washing our hands we are touching poop and pee! When I found out I freaked out, and told my teacher that we had to label each one, so we will know which scrub is for what. After telling him that we are washing our hands with poop and pee, he agreed, so I stuck the labels on. Also, most of the toilets in Taiwan are squat toilets, for those of you that don’t know what a squat toilet is, it’s just a whole in the ground instead of a whole in a chair. It’s harder to aim when you go in a squat toilet, therefore there are often splats of pee around the hole, and then we have to mop that pee. Squat toilets also tend to stink more than normal toilets so when we are mopping we hold our breaths.

The upper left picture is a squat toilet, The picture on the very bottom is a poster that reminds everyone to aim well when they go pee. Direct translation is "Hi kids, please squat properly, don't let pee pee and poo poo get outside of the toilet, it will make the bathroom stinky!" 

Then, I dumped and sorted the trash. This is how it works, we take the bag of trash to the big trash cans area, then we use tongs to separate normal paper, glass, milk and drink cartons, food trash, hard plastics, and thin plastics. I thought this job was actually okay because our job was just to dump the trash, it’s just that sometimes we help the other kids out to sort it too. The only thing that sort of sucked was that it really stunk! Many ants too.

Even though I think that “cleaning time” is sort of disgusting (sorry, I think I gave a bit too much information), I am still really glad to have this experience of discipline, basically if you make a mess you have to clean it up! There isn’t going to be some janitor who is going to clean up after you when they didn’t even make the mess! Now that I think about it, I was pretty spoiled in the USA, we had a janitor that would clean the school, and people would take it for granted! Even though there is a janitor in the USA it doesn’t necessarily make everything cleaner because people just think “Oh there is someone cleaning after me, guess it’s just fine that I got pee on the toilet!” Versus here, people think “Oh cleaning the bathroom is a real pain, I must make sure I don’t make a mess!” Because everyone cleans the school together, so they know how it’s like! And I’m glad that now I know how it’s like too! 

These are the stalls with the squat toilets.