The Cleanliness of White

If it ain't white, it ain't clean. In the States, we scrub the bathroom sink and toilet bowl until we can see our reflections in the white porcelain. If there is a rim of mildew or a few cracked tiles with dirt caked in the grout, a shower is too gross for us to bathe.

In rural regions of Central America, where there is no running water, the bathroom toilet is a latrine: a deep hole covered with a concrete seat (like the photo to the left). To shower, you use a bucket and a bowl.

After years of living among the white, sanitized, squeeky -clean nature of the U.S., it is a little shocking to be presented with such down to earth systems of relieving and cleaning. Yet I don't feel any less clean or sanitary. The latrines are cleaned daily, much more often than a toilet in a home in the States. I emerge from a bucket shower here (almost) as clean as I would after ten minutes under hot water with a loofah.

This same white versus earthy comparison can be said of hospitals. In Granada, we visited the public hospital to get Amanda's intermittent fever checked out. (Note: she is now fine and it was just a virus.) The rooms of the emergency ward wrap around an open courtyard. The "waiting room" is outside. People sit on the benches or chairs that snake around the garden of palm trees and flowering shrubs. The building is painted a warm cream color, the structural posts are green, the doors and roof red in color. The consultario office (where we first talked to a doctor about Amanda's symptoms) is small, with one desk, one chair and one cot. We walked across to the other side of the courtyard to enter the laboratorio for a blood sample. Amanda whispered to me as she sat down, "The needles are clean right?" I looked about the dimly lit room. One lady was taking samples, one was looking through a microscope, and another was putting medical tools into the sanitizer. Yes, I told her confidently - but really just to reassure us both.

As we waited outside on a concrete bench for the results, I looked around. A child coughed. An elderly man held his hands in his head, cradling a headache. Amanda lay down with a fever. Could this perhaps be a better waiting room than the ones in the States where everyone is inside breathing in others' germs?

In the States, hospitals are stark, white, and they humm of "clean." And we feel safe and sanitary. Yet Nicaraguans don't leave the hospital with diseases or illnesses that they contracted while being seen by a medical doctor. And nor did we. Like the toilets, just because the emergency room is more colorful and a bit more humble, doesn't necessarily denote it less clean. And although I still would not want open heart surgery here, the sanitary white-ness of the U.S. to the point of insanity suddenly seems frivolous.