Saturday, December 7, 2013

Dirt, Mud, and Buffalo Shit.

The amount of dust in our house has been a constant problem. Even if you sweep, the dust will return in a matter of minutes because our ground is made of dirt. In our bedrooms we could not walk around without shoes, and if anything were to fall on the ground it would become dirty instantly. The floor in our kitchen seemed to be cracking and overall everyone was very confused on how to approach the problem.  Discussing it amongst ourselves we began to find out own solutions. In two rooms people decided to lay rice shelling’s on the floor in order to suppress the dust.  While this seemed to be a solution for their bedrooms, it was not a solution to our kitchen. Dirt seemed to be getting everywhere. Cleaning the space and ourselves didn’t seem to matter because no matter what everything was covered.
            Yesterday the conversation was brought up in front of one of the Nepali Fellows and she simply explained that in order to maintain our houses we had to consistently “repair it”. This process involved creating a mixture of water, clay, and buffalo poop and laying it across the floor. At first, my thought was that obviously there had to have been a better solution to this problem then laying rice shelling’s all over the floor which had turned our house into a Gymboree.  I also couldn’t help but think we were ridiculous for not asking a Nepali person to begin with. Everyone here lives in mud houses and clearly we could not be the only people suffering from this problem and that obviously there must be a solution. However then my mind jumped to my second thought, which was “excuses me? You want me to lay cow shit on my kitchen floor?!”
 
    Today I decided that I had enough with our floor and that I needed to see for myself how this would work. I asked one of the Nelpali girls to come over and help me so that in the future I could do it by myself. As soon as Kritika came over she said “so where is the nearest buffalo?” I pointed down to my neighbor and we began to walk down to his house. As we approached the buffalo Kritika simply bent down and began picking up it’s poop and putting it into the bucket. Once it was a quarter of the way full she switched to mud. Once she was satisfied with the proportions we headed back to our house. I carried two buckets into the house, one with the poop mixture and one of water. Kritika  then instructed me to take out handfuls of the mixture and place it in scattered locations on the floor.After that I was instructed to take the water and pour a small bit over each spot where I had placed the mixture. Once that had been done we both knelt down to the ground each with a rag in hand and began spreading it across the floor.  
While I was shocked at the fact that I was actually spreading shit across my kitchen floor, I was more shocked at how well it worked! The cracks in our floor began to disappear and the dust settled. I also learned that in rooms where the dust is only a moderate problem you can just wet the floor and it will re-harden. Immediately I wan't to hit myself and say DUH! Clearly When your mud house turns into dirt, add water to turn it back to mud! Once we were done I immediately went to my room with a bucket of water and rag and wiped the surface of my floor and watched how the floor magically turned from a dusty uneven disaster to a smooth surface!                                                                                                                         


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