Clean Sweep!

I walked from the office late again.  Anywhere in the world, I get my best work done in the wee hours of the night.  But, this is especially true here, where our colleagues gossip their way right through the work day.  So, when I noticed 10:30 pm blinking out of my computer screen, I packed up and headed out.  Day time in Djibouti is full of characters, but the evenings are a world of their own.  Tonight, I encountered the street sweepers.  This notion might harken for you images in the States: spritzing, swirling, apparently drone-operated machines, cruising loadly down the pavement, leaving a shining, darkened surface behind them.  In Djibouti, however, street sweeping is a completely different matter.  When I emerged from my building, I found the block lined on both sides with women.  Like most gals from the Horn, their heads and faces were carefully covered in vibrant cloth.  Below this, each wore an ankle-length labcoat - hot pink, with reflective ribbon in paler pink around the hipline.  I have seem them dressed in tangerine on other occasions.  Each carried a healthy length of dried-white palm fond, which served as an industrial size broom.  Silent and steady in their plumes of dust, they swept out the nooks and corners along the Boulevard de Gaulle and on into downtown.

The concept of one's environment here is distorted.  Djibouti is both preoccupied with order and weighted toward squallor.  The street sweeping divas are the other side of garbage in Djibouti.  One hand is represented by an image that exists only distantly in my own childish memories.  Along the Boulevard, all day long, 4-wheel drive vehicles speed past.  A water bottle or a token of wrapper lifts from the driver's side window and clatters or floats into the street.  When I am present to see, I always glower at the vehicle occupants and bite back the curse that instinctively rises, and they look back with startled expressions.  This behavior is the same one that enables 30 professionals to drop their cookie wrappers on the floor while on a training session coffee break. And the one that encourages our driver to politely collect our used juice cans, only to pitch them alongside the road.  (Of course, before the campaigns of the 80s, Americans also never used the verb litter. Curiously, in the sense of "scattered oddments, disorderly debris" it was first attested in 1730, probably from the Middle English verb literen - "provide with bedding" (late 14c.) - with the notion of strewing straw).  Lead by example, I suppose.  When it is a country-wide predilection, I suppose that it is that all you can do.