Give us clean hands

“He who has clean hands…He will receive blessing from the Lord”  Psalms 24:4-5

Ok, so I kind of butchered that verse and took it a wee bit out of context but I need clean hands. Literally. We all do. Every afternoon we have to work on the compound for two and a half hours. This means pulling weeds, digging, slashing or, if you are lucky, cleaning. Yes, the lucky ones get to clean as in mop, dust, sweep, wash the cars, etc. Those are the jobs where your hands don’t hurt for days afterwards. Yesterday I spent my day pulling weeds. These aren’t tiny garden weeds that we find at home; they are huge weeds up to your knees. After two hours, I had three blisters that had popped, a couple small cuts, and dirt in the depths of the wrinkles on my hands. I have had two showers and still haven’t gotten all the dirt off my hands.

I thought it was just my poor, precious, fragile mzungu (white person) hands but when I look at everyone else’s hands, they are just the same and some are even worse. We are all feeling it. I have used more band-aids in the past week than I have in the last 2 years.

However, one of my classmates said to me yesterday, “Nikole, I don’t know where the myth came from that mzungus are weak because you are much stronger than I am. I admire that.”