Anyhoo. I figured I'd have a sleep in on Sunday morning. Yeah… um, loud political rally going on at around midnight. (Who do they think turns up to those things at that crazy time of night?! Answer: Obviously quite a lot of people cos there was a bit of a racket.) So finally get to sleep and then around 5:40am some neighbour starts cranking up the really bad Christmas carols – the soppy-voice-bad-music type, then the Muslim call to prayer (which I think gives everyone else license to start being noisy) then loud knocking at our landlord's door for around 20 minutes (hey, maybe she's not home or asleep like I am...was!). And then… as per normal the swoosh-swoosh-swoosh noise. The noise which I cannot escape here. The noise I hear every morning no matter where I'm staying. It's the noise of … sweeping the dirt.
Why? You ask. Yeah, I'd sure as hell like to know too. I thought that if I lived here long enough I'd start to understand…
At first I thought it was to pick up all the leaves cos when it rains the curves of the leaves on the ground can make good breeding places for mosquitos. But there's not been any rain lately (in fact I saw someone watering the dirt to prevent it from blowing up dust) and I have seen people sweeping the dirt when there are no leaves around at all.
Then I thought that maybe it was like how you get those little Japanese gardens. But those gardens have raked gravel or sand and are very formal looking. A lot of the dirt I've seen swept here isn't really a part of a structured garden. It's the dirt near or on pavements or the dirt where you'd normally find a lawn back home.
The dirt is swept every day, usually in the very early hours of the morning, and when there's leaves around they get picked up and burnt. Composting doesn't happen here which is a bit of a shame but perhaps with the wide range of creatures here it's all just too dangerous (e.g. imaging getting a snake in a compost bin or a poisonous spider – eek). Maybe that's it? Could it prevent spiders and snakes turning up? Could a snake's tracks in the swept dirt alert you to their presence? But then the dirt gets swept on concrete and right in the city where there's no way a snake would hang out and I've not seen any squashed snakes on the roads in town. Australia has snakes and big spiders too but I haven't seen dirt sweeping there.
I'm also a bit confused at the tool which is used to do the sweeping. They're little brushes made out of reeds and they're short which means that people here have to bend over to sweep. It all looks a bit back breaking and time consuming to me. I have seen brooms here and other garden tools. So using those little brushes seems a bit like brushing your hair with a mascara wand.
Hmm, maybe I'm thinking a bit too much about this but it's really bugging me. Sure, I know that if a local here came to NZ they'd be weirded out by lots of stuff - the pre-cut pumpkin on a polystyrene tray covered in glad wrap, singly wrapped prunes, people who never take off-road vehicles off the road… Actually I find all that stuff weird too. But anyway, I shall make it my mission to get to the bottom of this dirty secret (pun intended) before I finish up here.
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