What is the one job you could NEVER see yourself doing? Is there a place you draw the line because it would just be WAY too disgusting? For me, it is cleaning bathrooms. I am so disgusted by the thought of anything that gets deposited in a toilet and the thought of it touching me. When I have to clean bathrooms I wear gloves, use a ton of chemicals, and take every precaution to make sure I do not contaminate myself.
Well this week on the farm in Albania, I had to come face to face with the poopiest job of my life…and I had to tackle it without gloves…and with very limited sanitizer!
It was not a bathroom that I was cleaning…well, not a human bathroom. No. I had the wonderful privilege of scrubbing the poop out of barn stalls. When I first found out this was the job I would be doing I was thinking, “This is going to be the longest week of my life”.
We got to work scooping poopy hay out of the stalls with a pitchfork, putting it in wheelbarrows, and dumping it in to the pig pen (which required squeezing in to the pen with the pigs). After that we started scrubbing the floor and sides of the stalls and scraping the caked on poop from the troughs.
I was so surprised to find out that I really enjoyed this poopy job! It was so fun scooping, scraping, and scrubbing poop with my teammates. We of course made a million jokes about the irony of this being the “crappiest” day of our lives. We brought a speaker out and played music and danced and laughed together. We all got over the fact that we were initially uncomfortable and not particularly thrilled about this job. Maybe it wasn’t the job we would have volunteered for if we had known exactly what was involved…but we put those thoughts aside and we gave it our best. We got a first hand example of how incredibly hard the Albanian farmers work because if they would have had to do this job they would most likely have had only two people and it would have taken far longer. Not to mention the many other duties they have on the farm that take the full day, everyday, in the very hot sun!
This week I realized the real “scoop on poop”, the secret to getting through the most undesirable jobs or the things you thought you would never have to do…its all about you. Its all about your attitude and the people you are with. I never thought I would have had one of the best days in Albania getting completely filthy in a barn, but I did. It would have been easy for any one of us to turn up our nose and just “get the job done”. We could have easily whined about the job and worked in silence, moping about having to do this manual labor for several days straight. This attitude would have really made the job poopy!
I am now convinced that I can tackle any job that comes my way just by having a positive attitude and some good music. I can’t wait to see what is in store for my team because I saw an amazing side of them during this past week and I know that we are ready for anything and to jump right in…no matter how “poopy” the job may be!
