THE DOMESTIC SCENE

THE DOMESTIC SCENE

Domesticity seems to be dominated by cleaning:  cleaning the house and washing the clothes - and oneself - head the list of tasks to be performed with alarming regularity.  In my experience, all cities are fairly dirty places, but the amount of dust, sand and grime of every sort which seems to deposit itself everywhere here is truly prodigious.  Shoe cleaning is a never-ending chore: all it takes is to step outside and shoes seem to look as though they had never seen a brush let alone polish. Thank Heavens for the washing-machine.  If the same amount of clothes washing had had to be done in Bolivia with the methods available there, then I think we would have had to return to the fig-leaf! House cleaning is less onerous now that a mop and pail have been procured -  at enormous cost - from Lebanon.  

Outside the confines of the house a dilemma arises.  As nobody seems to pay any attention to the state of the entrance and staircase and no communal arrangement exists for its upkeep, is it acceptable to do something about this lamentable state of affairs?  The banisters are adorned with a thick layer of dust, not to mention the grillework on the front door.  In the end I opted for a surreptitious cleaning policy starting with my own steps and banisters down to the landing below.  Then, when I could no longer stand the sight of the entrance, I  made an onslaught on that.  Someone would seem to have taken notice because a couple of days later the maid in the first floor house went out and swished water down the stairs to the entrance.  Discretion, I think, might be the best policy here.

The situation regarding stair cleaning is symptomatic of the state of affairs generally in the country.  There would appear to be no system of communal cooperation: it is every man for himself.  This means that the rooftop of every building has a maze of satellite dishes (illegal mind you!), as each family installs its own system rather than getting together to have one system for the block.  Heating arrangements are the same.  Each family has its own diesel tank where heating fuel is stored so there is a profusion of tanks both for diesel and for water.  

Shopping is easy because there are little shops everywhere which are open from morning till night apart from siesta time at mid-day, so, if you discover you need something at 9 or 10 p.m., there is sure to be a shop open to supply the missing article.  Due to the various religious creeds to be found, there are shops open seven days a week, because the Moslems close on Fridays, the Jews on Saturdays and the Christians on Sundays.  Apart from the shops, there are plenty of little makeshift fruit stalls which are open virtually round the clock and the people sleep there too. As the area where we live has a high concentration of foreigners with most Embassy residences situated here, the shops in this district tend towards the minimarket type. Prices are correspondingly higher too.

The contents of the shops are quite different from the average European shop.  Khubz or pitta bread, is sold everywhere and in various sizes. The wholemeal variety can be found sometimes at limited outlets. There  is  a bakery round the corner which caters for the European market and sells French baguettes and such like. Olives of various types are also available, as well as houmous. Yoghurt is sold in large size tubs rather than individual cartons and the price, which is half the  price of a litre of milk, would seem to indicate that people eat yoghurt rather than drinking milk. Rose water and orange-blossom water are also on sale in the general store as they are used so widely in cooking. In the cleaning area, it is interesting that cleaning fluids tend not to be lemon and pine scented, as people are used to in Europe, but jasmine, rose and violet scented.  However, such things are still luxury items as the average person sluices out the house with water.  

For a country which suffers from water shortages, particularly during the summer months, the use, or rather misuse, of water is quite remarkable. All cleaning involves using vast quantities of water and there are hosepipes attached in every house to make it easier to reach the farthest nooks and crannies.  If I were in the government, I would set up a  factory to manufacture mops and pails and make the possession and use of these instruments obligatory as a water-saving measure.  This step alone would, I am sure, make water cuts unnecessary!


Gas for cooking comes in bottles which are distributed by a small truck which does the rounds several times a day.  The bottles are tossed in haphazard fashion into the  back of the truck, and a man sitting in the midst of them announces their arrival by beating out a rhythm on the bottles with a stick.

Things are not cheap by any means.  In fact, most things are at least as expensive as in Spain and any imported goods are astronomical in price.  Animal food is generally unavailable but sometimes there is the  odd can or two on a shelf and a can of cat food costs about three times what I would expect to pay in Spain.One of the reasons for this high price is that these products are smuggled in from Lebanon.  Another  major factor contributing to the high cost of goods is the artificially high exchange rate.  For goods to have a realistic price, the currency really should be devalued to a third of its present rate which (on the black market) is 53 Syrian pounds to the US dollar. A more realistic level would be 150SL to the dollar.

March 31st 1998