Working Hard: Recycling Centre at Christ University

(Journaled on March 5, 2012)

            I volunteered at Christ University's Recycling Centre for four hours on March 5^th 2012.  I had come to volunteer without any of my fellow classmates, but unlike before, I was instructed to work on a single person task rather than a group task.  One of the full-time employees set up a pile of freshly dried paper sheets, a tub of paint with a paintbrush, and a 4” tall metal box for me to sit on.  My task was to paint the paper sheets an orange color and then place them along the sidewalk to dry. 

            The isolation of the painting task was very uncomfortable and lonely.  In the beginning I had simply been focusing on painting even strokes and making sure that there were not any white spots left on the sheets.  Shortly after that, I was unable to consciously think about the task at hand for it was too mundane.  It was only about 45 minutes into my painting that I began to get back and leg cramps.  I knew that I had more than 3 hours to go, so I put my self on a schedule of adjusting my sitting position every 10 minutes or so. 

            As the time pushed on, I began to feel as though I was getting a tiny taste of the work life of the full-time employees.  The work of the paper center is physically demanding and not intellectually stimulating.  The women working here come from the slums and are dependent on this job to sustain themselves as well as their families.  In other words, they are working here because they have to and not because they are achieving any satisfaction.  It is disheartening to think that these women are unable to pursue any higher aspirations that they may have for themselves, because they are of a low caste and low socio-economic status.  I can only imagine what the women would prefer to do other than the repetitive tasks assigned to them here.  Regardless of whether or not the women would prefer to be in another field of work or study; however, all three of the full-time employees perform their job with accuracy and efficiency.  They do not let the discomfort impact their performance on any level. It was this realization on my part that made me admire these women on a whole new level.  I had only worked for four consecutive hours and was already allowing the discomfort to negatively impact my work performance.  I began painting at a much slower pace and was constantly leaving the hunched-over body position to straighten my back.  By all means, I do not even compare to the full-time employees at the paper center.

            During my four hours, all of the employees took their 30-minute lunch break.  I continued painting the paper sheets as I observed the 5 women share their lunch break together.  There was a lot of joking and laughing amongst them and they all seemed to have cheery personalities.  One of the women that were not part of the paper center team stood out to me.  She had a small frame with defined muscles on her arms and hands.  Her face, neck, and arms were covered in burn scars.  Her scarring reminded me of what I had learned in my Indian Women's Issues course about honor killings.  In traditional honor killings women are burned alive by her family if her husband dies, if she marries a man that is outside of her caste, if she “dishonors” her family in any way, or even if a male in her family dishonors the family.  Although I do not know the story behind the severely burned woman, I can only imagine under what circumstances that she was burned.