I waited for my roommates to go to bed, put on my iPod, and spent four hours on the start of a campaign to clean the kitchen. My hands are now greasy and wrinkled.
The kitchen sink has a single tub with a single facet. Out of this facet comes local, developing-world, room-temperature, tap water. Not even my native Indian roommates will drink it. Besides germs, this water is saturated with salt. One time I boiled this water, drank it, and waited fifteen minutes until I felt gross. Fortunately that was all that happened. While I think it would be interesting to drink it without boiling it, I don't want to see that experiment go a certain way. An alternative would be to view some of it under a microscope, but right now I don't have access to one of those.
Anyway the point is that there is no hot water in the kitchen. When I want to clean dishes with hot water, I get it from the bathroom. The bathroom has a hot water facet in addition to the normal facet. There is a spot where an electric water heater is expected to be placed. You actually do have to plug the water heater into a power outlet on the wall. The power outlet is controlled by a switch outside the bathroom.
With this stuff in place, I can retrieve a pot of hot water. I soak the day's dirty silverware in the pot for thirty minutes while I scrub the larger dishes. I keep my scrubbing sponge poised and ready, alternating between the detergent and the hot water.
In general, everything I've seen since landing has been dusty and dirty. My bedroom is probably one of the few areas that is relatively clean. It's possible to keep things clean, but its hard, and its easier to give up trying and adopt a "get in and get out" attitude instead. One stops keeping things, such as deoderant, in the bathroom. Instead, one gets into the bathroom, washes, and gets out. Then, one puts on some deodorant. But not in the bathroom, because the bathroom is dirty. Likewise, with the kitchen, one goes in to prepare food, but then one escapes and eats the food outside in a different room.
But what the kitchen has that no other room in the house has are cockroaches. These roaches aren't as big as one imagines. They look like what Wikipedia calls oriental roaches, or something like that. One thinks of "water bugs" upon seeing them. I've seen one dead roach of the larger variety at the bottom of my apartment complex, but I haven't seen a large one yet. I've only seen smaller ones.
Last week, a couple of the roaches climbed into my oatmeal while it cooked (and immediately died from the temperature of the boiling water), prompting me to make a new serving. I have to be watchful when I cook.
While, in theory, we have a maid who cleans, in practice, the kitchen is not clean. Rashida only comes once a day, in the mornings, and just like us, she has grown accustomed to working in a tolerably dirty kitchen. And there is just a lot of other stuff to do, like wash our clothes or sweep our floors, and she only has an hour or two per day.
In the afternoon, Naayak the cook prepares a meal and then gets out, leaving the cookware on the counter. In the evenings, my roommates pile their dirty dishes in the sink - usually after a rinse of cool water - and then they get out of the kitchen. The roaches will have several dark hours of a moist, fertile environment in which to drink water and gather food.
A female roach can eat, be fertlized, and feel secure enough to start a family. She'll lay an egg, and with enough time, a generation of over a dozen youngsters will pop out of the egg and continue the family lineage. Recently, I captured a female roach and her egg:
Tonight I killed about 10 roaches with poisonous spray, 5 with my hands, and 2 with my shoe. A couple of them escaped by running away from me. The floor collects carcases, which either I or Rashida wind up sweeping.
I've been trying to think of how to get rid of the roaches once and for all. I can "poison them all", find and destroy the eggs, starve them of nutrition, or call in a specialist. Of these options, I am trying to starve them of nutrition. I see about one roach per week scampering around in my bed room, but they do not settle there. I see one roach per day in the bathroom, but again, they don't settle in there. I've seen dozens of them in the kitchen - many of them young. They settle here.
I think the kitchen is providing them with nourishment, and so by cleaning (and drying) the kitchen, I hope to starve them. It will take days or even weeks to get a clean kitchen. It is humid, and there is no circulation in the kitchen, so things take a long time to dry. A fan might help with this, so perhaps I will buy one, and then I'll figure out a great place to put it so that it circulates more air. Or, maybe I can buy some cheap towels just for drying our dishes.
It also might be helpful to buy a new cupboard, and create more room to store dishes. We rarely clean the counter beside the sink because we store recently cleaned dishes on it - the counter is never clear. We don't seem to have space for everything. We some unused space in the cupboards, so perhaps I can try clearing some more space out in there.
I am trying to clean this flat.
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