Boo boo in select company

Boo boo in select company
Something to say?

Friday 13 March 2020

Of Issues and Tissues

Of Issues and Tissues

It was a stray mention on Facebook that started my deep meditation about important issues and tissues. Like toilet paper and kitchen wipes, baby nappies and all else that wipe, clean and we throw away.  My friend, Sue, I know, considers all her buying options carefully. For instance, she doesn't buy anything from Amazon. There was a discussion on Facebook, between her and friends, on the most important issue (tissue) resulting from COVID 19 and the panic buying. Toilet paper in particular.
  I have been in this place before, I think. There was the time in Ndola, in Zambia, in 1971, when there was a run on toilet paper. I couldn't care less, as I was hanging on to my Indian/ Kerala personal hygiene  protocols. The crisis passed unnoticed in our household.
  Later, in the early 1980s when I worked in Makeni in Sierra Leone, there was an acute shortage, which lasted a while. I lived on the Makeni Teachers' College campus, where I worked; the students in the hostels created an enormous cacophony about the absence of toilet paper in their bathrooms. Mr Lenga- Koroma, our no-nonsense Principal told them off for acquiring 'Western' habits. 'In your villages, how did you manage?' he declaimed from the stage in the auditorium, to disgruntled budding teachers.
  Enough detail on this delectable one -- suffice it is to stay that our college water supply was not reliable. Nothing was in assured supply in Makeni except the warmth of our Makeni Temne people.
  Apropos of all this I did an audit of our larder in prosperous Purley, and considered the numerous things we now consider essential, which I had not heard of in Thalassery, where I grew up.
  I came across, tomato sauce, disposable nappies, pure, flowing cooking salt, Jeyes cloths, sponges, shampoo... Instead, in India, we had crystallized salt, which came straight from the sea via the local corner shop; it took a moment to dissolve in our conjee, occasionally looked a little sea-grey, but it cost almost nothing as the sea was just round the corner. For sauces we had pickles and sweet chutneys, and instead of shampoo, we managed with chick-pea flour and moong paste. Worked well enough. The chick-pea left skin smooth to the touch. The moong was a nuisance when it wasn't ground properly to a paste, it would stick to our long hair and take ages to  wash off. Sometimes we used pounded Hibiscus leaves for our hair; it made hair lustrous. My first soap -- a green Rexona -- was a gift from my father at the wondrous age of fifteen.
  As for nappies, my children grew up on cloth napkins, which I washed and re-used; for wipes for surfaces and floors , we used old cloth. I am delighted and grateful for all the new things in my Western existence, but I would not call them essential.
  So it's back to basics for me.  Starting with old strips of cloth for my spills and surfaces and floors.