January 19, 2011

• Hoarding

  I confess that in the past i’ve been somewhat of a hoarder. I’ve got so many pieces of memorabilia from my experiences all over the world, you see, and who wouldn’t want a global beer-coaster or postcard collection?! haha. Who would toss lovely cards and letters from friends and pen-pals from Europe and the Baltics all penning the story of life for us during those exciting times? Truly, all those many, many boxes of junk souvenirs tells quite a detailed story of the adventures I’ve lived abroad since i was 16 years old. This last furlough, however, due to the fact that my parents moved into a brand new house and therefore had to up-end their old one, including the basement, of all their junk life souvenirs and those of my brothers and i, it was evident that storing all that junk memorabilia was something i needed to reconsider… or else pay a storage premium in my dad’s newly pristine mechanical/storage room. So, before i could get all weepy about it all, i burned it. All. Well, except for the photos. And journals. I burned almost all the wedding cards, baby shower cards, any card that didnt have some sort of very significant writing in it. I burned all the pictures of other people’s kids (GASP! ) and it was liberating! One thing that we must all know (surely) is that things drag you down. They create obligations and responsibilities. Like, where to store them, how to ensure they dont get damaged, protecting them from would-be thieves… When we left for Madagascar we left (apart from the boxes of junk memorabilia that i hadnt yet disposed of):
  1. the queen-sized bed we received for our wedding which has now been pressed into use by my parents as a guest bed for the plethora of people who make use of our their sweet-suite.
  2. two really nice lamps which my mother is trying to absorb into her own furniture collection. haha. (i laugh because i would have done [and already have in other cases] the same thing). I always ask to borrow them when we’re home on furlough.
  3. assorted other lamps
  4. our wedding dishware which we use during furloughs (that way it always feels new and exciting like when we first got married. )
  5. one brown chair.
  6. winterwear.
  7. journals and photo albums.

  Everything else we owned (like our beloved diesel VW Jetta) we sold prior to our departure. Well, and we brought along our wedding-gift pots and pans and kitchen utensils because Josh couldnt live without them. Leaving Canada without anything tying us down there – no debt, no (meaningful) possessions – was one of the most freeing thing we’ve done. There was nothing to worry about, no house to rent to others who may not treat “our” things well and needed to be maintained and paid for, no expensive things to worry about whether it’s being kept safe.

  Living overseas, however, has put an entirely new twist on the word hoarding for us. Hoarding now takes on a “prudent” disguise because we dont have access to the things that we might otherwise have used/enjoyed in Canada: Carnation Hot Chocolate mix, for example. Tea from Cornelia Bean. Chocolate chips. Peanut butter. Good underwear and socks. Bath & Body Works hand soaps. Tennis racket strings. Guitar strings. Where we would just go out and get more peanut butter when we ran out of it in Canada, here we need to hoard any peanut butter we find when it comes to the shops (which it hasnt now since November). Where most people in Canada dont hide the Bath & Body Works hand pump soaps when guests come over, i confess that i’m tempted to do just that because i only have so many pumps to last me until our next trip to Canada to re-stock. haha. (it was somewhat painful to use one entire bottle the month my family was in house, i confess). Josh is very careful about letting others use his guitar because it’s next to impossible to replace strings here with good quality ones. I’ve heard him deliberate about how to change his overhand so as to treat his tennis racket strings better and thereby use them longer. I use linen table napkins not because i’m posh, but because i’m too much of a hoarder to use the pretty napkins i’ve been sent as gifts.

  I remember seeing a drawer full of pretty napkins in my grandma’s house when it was being cleaned out after she died. I remember thinking to myself that i totally understood the thought behind hoarding those pretty things… but that in the end she didnt get to use them because she kept them too long.

  Yesterday we had Baked Herb Chicken out of the More With Less cookbook (p. 179) because i knew we still had 2 cans of mushroom soup on the shelf, imported from Canada in a far by-gone era. I asked Josh if he thought canned mushroom soup would go bad because i didn’t remember when we bought/brought it over. He declared that surely it wouldn’t go bad and probably there wasn’t even a expiry date on it and, if there was, it would be the year 3000. Ha. I looked it over and found it all right: Sept 2009! Anyway, it smelled ok and tasted fine. It just looked a bit worse for wear… we’re still living this morning so i suppose it was still edible. But the idea that we had stored canned mushroom soup for our entire first 4-year term in Madagascar without ever using it… gah!

  So this year/term i’m determining not to hoard things. I even shared my new imported Cornelia Bean tea with two people already! And some of my family drank half of our imported hot chocolate this last Christmas without knowing that it was unattainable in Madagascar and we wouldn’t get anymore until Christmas 2011! haha. It’s silly, i know. It sounds silly especially to people living in Canada where they can go get Carnation hot chocolate 25 minutes after reading this blog entry if they so desired. In Madagascar though these are the kind of treats we dream about, talk about amongst missionaries, plan our furloughs around, get excited about when we leave the country for a more privileged locale like Nairobi where we can buy cottage cheese (sigh!!)…

  I think this kind of thing (hoarding food items and the like) has a lot to do with culture shock, or the knowledge of it anyway. When my family was here i could see that some of them found it difficult to be pressed into cooking duty but not have access to the pantry items they were used to having at their fingertips. Moreover, not only were these items not in the pantry,  they weren’t guaranteed to be at the store either! I know they didn’t recognize the stress caused by these dilemmas as culture shock, but i sure did. I saw them flummoxed at these things and realized that after 5 years living here, we had overcome that particular hurdle. We’ve adapted our cooking and eating habits to fit with the items we can easily find here. That is also, in part, one of the reasons the Madagascar Missionaries have created the Madagascar Manna recipe blog – so we can help each other find yummy things to cook with what we’ve got on hand. And to give one another the heads up on where to find certain impossible-to-find things. And where we can go out to eat without getting sick. That blog is what could possibly be termed a hoarding of knowledge.

  Anyway, as we continue to live here and make this place our home our list of import items gets shorter, in part due to the fact that some things are easier to find, and other parts due to the fact that i’m learning how to either do without or make it myself, or people leave their underwear behind for us to use. HAha. It’s a liberating feeling, severing ties with things. It’s something we fear though, returning to Canada if/when we would ever move back: to reattach to things that are within easy reach. alas.

  • 1:58 am
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