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Bathtime in Mongolia
Recently we spent a month in the Mongolian countryside.
It was all very outdoorsy and wonderful; sleeping in ger tents with the
nomads and their goats, using pit toilets when we were lucky and going
behind a rock when we weren't. In villages where they send their little
boys to collect water from a spring a mile away, there's not much point
in asking if you can have a wash.
Hygiene is a Western invention. It fits perfectly with capitalism: first
you educate the populace, via advertisement about cleanliness and hygiene.
"If you want to be healthy, being clean is a good start" is similar to
the "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" of Victorian England. Next thing
you know young women are buying up exfoliators and even young men are
buying moisturiser, if quietly.
Asia's still a step behind Europe in all this. Watching television in
Mongolia you notice that every single ad during the breaks is for a beauty
or hygiene product. Even a lot of the programmes are taken up with beauty
makeovers or Wella-sponsored hairdressing competitions and the like.
Coming from Europe, where such attention to cleanliness is taken for granted,
its strange to se how Asians are adapting to capitalism and western styles
of cleanliness. We might assume running water is the foundation of hygiene
in the home, but in a nomadic society all that specialised infrastructure
doesn't make sense when you move on six months later. In the West we were
industrialised before we became monstrous consumers and so our Body Shop
addictions grew from the existing mechanics of sterilised homes and cities.
In Mongolia, they've skipped the whole industrialisation stage and gone
straight to importing their Johnson and Johnson into a nomadic agricultural
society.
Not all the Mongolians are enamoured with these new ways, but in one family's
house where we stayed, in a small village in remote countryside, the young
girl used to put Fa deodorant on her hair after combing it. I wasn't sure
if she just wanted it to smell that way, or if she thought it was hairspray.
In this family, there was a three-month old baby and seeing how they managed
without nappies (disposable or cloth) made me think of how my great-grandmother
probably did it eighty years ago. They wrapped a small cotton sheet around
the baby's bottom first, then a sheet of plastic and finally swaddled
the child in a thick sleeping bag type material, tied with string. The
child was almost constantly being undone and changed and when she'd dirtied
herself, the faeces were scraped off the cotton with a kitchen knife and
this would often sit on the table with food and cups of tea, before being
disposed of in the toilet. The mother of the family usually did this job
but often the father would do it with a look of pride or the other children
would vie with each other for the chance. All was done smilingly; never
was a nose turned up or any reluctancy shown whatsoever. Comparing this
to how it's done in Ireland was obviously rather interesting.
This family lived in a one-roomed, wooden house and in the front garden
was their pit toilet. They used the scarce water for making tea and washing
kitchen utensils. Clothes were washed occasionally and bodies very rarely.
The family's mirror was a shrine to the growing religion of western cleanliness:
all around it were neat rows of empty boxes of toothpaste and soap packet.
Proof enough that what was shown on the ads was still quite novel and
fun.
The thing about hygiene is you consider what you're used to to be the
ideal. In India, the last word in good housekeeping can be to wash the
floor with cow dung. Just as the tentacles of capitalism are closing in
on rural Mongolia and changing habits, slowly but surely, some Americans
we met who'd lived three years or so in gers in the countryside were changing
too. Though they'd grown up with a daily shower, it had become normal
for them not to wash for three months in the Winter.
Before leaving Ulaan Baatar, the capital city, for our jaunt into the
countryside we had a marathon cleaning and grooming session. Knowing that
cleanliness might be hard to come by for the next while, we tried to stock
up much the way camels store food in their humps. For the first few days
the novelty of travelling in battered, old Russian Jeeps on dirt track
roads through amazing untouched landscape made me forget that I hadn't
even washed my hands in all that time.
Teeth brushing was the only concession to the standards I was used to
but when, one day, I spat out my toothpaste into a sudden gust of wind
and got minty, white, stains on my already-grubby trousers I became less
enthusiastic about it. Sometimes in the Spring sandstorms I almost forgot
that warm water was a great aid to washing. It felt like the dirt was
being sandblasted from my skin. My hands quickly became Mongolian hands.
Though my white skin was still visible beneath the layers of filth, the
ingrained dirt in my finger prints was growing more and more impressive.
It all came to a head when we'd been staying with the aforementioned family
for some days. There wasn't the privacy in a one-roomed house to change
clothes, even if I'd had any to change into. Mutton is the staple food
for most Mongolians and I became convinced that the smell of this meat
was everywhere- in my hair, in my clothes, my sleeping bag. I fished into
the bottom of my rucksack and found my shampoo bottle: "Laboratoires Garnier".
Oh, temple of civilisation! Frequent use it says- cruel tease. I sniffed
it and became quite emotional. On this same day, as my companion Andreas
was playing with the barebottomed child, nature called and he was unlucky
enough to take the hit all over his trousers. As the urine soaked in,
we began to think a wash might really be in order. Then when Andreas was
changing and his underpants fell into the pit toilet it became a matter
of urgency. There were hot springs nearby: we had to go there!
Our Mongolian Phrase Book was great if you wanted to say "Are your yaks
feeling well?" but getting directions in remote countryside was rather
more complicated. Somehow we got across an idea of what we wanted and
were directed to Gambold, the man with the Jeep who would take us there.
Over mountains, through valleys covered with volcanic rock, into a forest
and finally across a frozen river we came to the magical hot springs.
The water was 50 degrees C and into the hillside were stationed bathtubs
with crude plumbing. It looked like a dreamworld.
It was heaven to sink into a bath full of warm spring water. Along with
the layers of dirt and the smell of mutton, all the hardships of being
in Mongolia soaked away. Through the soap-smelling steam we could see
a few curious locals staring, amused at our pink bodies. Coming out of
the forest with wrinkled fingertips and squeaky clean skin we were all
set for another blast of Mongolia. Before us we could see the mountains,
forests, lakes, rivers animals and birds with a new enthusiasm. At the
back of my mind though, it was always comforting to know I would soon
return to warm water in tiled bathrooms full of plastic bottles.
by Laura Macky,
from Bat Ulzi, Mongolia
18th November 2001
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