Clean toilets, relatively

We had some family visiting us. Not close family. Cousins.

We got into a discussion. Enough said - this should be the end of the blog. 

However, if I stopped here, I would forfeit the enjoyment of getting riled up.

Living in Africa can be a bipolar experience. There are tremendous ups, but as with a sign wave there are deep downs. At dinner table my spouse described a 'down' as experienced in a local hospital. This hospital lost one of it’s patients for three days. He was found in one of the toilets – dead. Now this is not the story for today.

Today's story is about cleanliness. That of the toilet my spouse intended using while visiting a patient in hospital. Fortunately we had finished eating. The toilet bowl, seat and cistern were covered in shit. Some brown, some old black. The walls and floor were sprayed with shit and urine. Some people were fussy enough not to use the toilet and shat on the floor. 

My spouse immediately confronted the nursing staff, questioned their lack of pride in their work, their hygiene and their culture. Yes their culture. Nursing practice is very much determined by ‘culture’ and not by the text-book. If a intravenous needle is dropped on the bedding, it will be inserted into the vein. If questioned, the nurse will say: “Oh – it is our culture.” The toilets are also a ‘cultural’ thing, as is the indignation shown by my spouse towards the nurses. But they did not understand what the fuss was about.

To be fair, not all our hospitals are like this. Part of the problem is that our hospitals now have ‘nursing managers’ and do not have ‘matrons’. Matrons were like sergeant majors in an army camp. You would hear the hell coming from a distance even if everything was heavenly clean. The nursing managers only manage themselves and their entitled position, their fancy cars and clothes. A ‘job’ is really just a political appointment allocated by the party, and has nothing to do with service and responsibility.

 The discussion at the table became quite lively around the subject what other people thought of clean, not so clean and dirty toilets (we had done eating). Until one visitor, who is an utter relativist, killed the conversation with another one of their relativist statements: “A clean or dirty toilet is relative to who you are. To some it is clean, to others it is dirty.” I wanted to say: “Is your STATEMENT about clean or dirty toilets RELATIVE or is the STATEMENT TRUE.” But I bit my tongue and allowed the conversation to go elsewhere. I had decided before the visit that a relative relative(cousin) was relatively irrelevant. That’s close to nothingness, relatively.

Now to get the perspective in place. The toilet described in the hospital above is, lets say ‘filthy’. The Thesaurus cannot give me a better word for a room that is capacity filled with shit. Not even any standing room.

A clean toilet, as my mother would say to her domestic servant (that’s politically correct ‘speak’ for ‘house maid’) is a toilet, when clean, one can wash one’s face in it. She would show the servant how to clean the toilet, and then demonstrate how clean it is by washing her face. First you will shudder, but if you think about it, that makes sense. Clean is clean.

So we have what is a filthy toilet and what is a clean toilet.

This is a relatively clean toilet. I cannot see anything offensive. Some people would not notice if a toilet is clean..

 

This is a relatively dirty toilet. I can see some offensive stuff. Some people would not notice.

My mothers toilet is clean no matter who you are. The Hospital toilet is filthy no matter who you are. CLEAN and FILTHY are absolute objective concepts, and there is nothing relative about them. CLEAN and FILTHY does not depend on subjective notions from culture, class, colour or training.

So to you relativists. Your opinion is relative, and therefore worthless. Stop relativizing everything into relative dreamland. Get real.

Oh, and by the way

Fokjo