What does it mean to be clean?

When you think of something being clean, what does that mean to you? I'm sure you have lots of ideas about it, just like I did. You probably imagine something spotlessly white and shiny.

Does hand sanitizer make your hands clean?

Not according to Doris. At first her skepticism about hand sanitizer seemed like ignorance, and I'll admit, I laughed (although that was largely due to the high pitched exclamatory noises that she likes to make, and the wildly expressive faces she pulls).

But really... what does it mean to be clean? And why am I so attached to my own cultural conceptions of cleanliness?

Hand sanitizer is supposed to clean your hands by killing 99.9% of germs, right? So is that what it means to be clean? To have all the germs killed? I thought so, and tried to explain this to Doris. She had a variety of responses.

"If you pour hand sanitizer on an ant, will it die? Isn't the ant more poisonous than germs?"

"If you go from air conditioned room to air conditioned car to air conditioned room and pour that on your hands, it will make you clean! But if you drive in the dust on a moto and you have grease on your hands and you pour that on your hands, they will still be dirty. Ghana dirt is stronger than Canada dirt!"

But is being sanitary the same as being clean? I can put hand sanitizer on my hands and be fairly sure that subsequently eating with them will not make me sick... but I can also be fairly sure that I will still have dust hiding in the cracks and wrinkles.

This issue came up talking about water too.

"This is borehole water! It is cleaner than the purewaters!" (500mL sachets of filtered and treated drinking water).

I tried to tell Doris that the borehole water may be very clean, and void of chemicals that sometimes give the sachets a bit of a flavour, but that it has bacteria in it that my body's not used to, so it might make me sick.

"It will not make you sick! It is clean. Your purewater will make you sick. When you taste it, it has things in it. It is not just water, not like the this thing."

"Your body will be fine. It can't even hurt solmeias." (Frafra word for strangers/white people. Like the Twi "obruni")

So, giving into peer pressure (since Marika had some) and boss-pressure (?) from Doris, I drank some of the borehole water, and lo and behold, it didn't make me sick.

In my head, the whole time, I was wondering, "Why is this clean? Couldn't it have some kind of contaminants? Could I get a parasite or cholera or something?"

But why am I afraid of whatever contaminants might be in the water from the ground, and from nature, but I have no fear of chemical contaminants that might be in my industrially treated water? Why do I trust one and not the other, when they are both, in their own ways, "clean" and "unclean?"

Why, even after having tasted the borehole water and suffering no adverse effects, am I still buying purewater instead of drinking the borehole water for free?

Clearly I have culturally rooted ideas about what makes things clean for me to eat and drink, and clearly they are pretty deeply embedded. But they are such common-sense assumptions... truths that I never really questioned, that I find I don't entirely know why I think one thing is clean and one thing isn't.

The same can be said for people here, though.

I've tried a few times asking Ghanaians why they sweep the outside, and all I can ever get as an answer is, "so that it will be clean."

Every day, my host sisters get out their brooms (usually early in the morning) and sweep all the leaves and twigs and rocks and berries out of the compound, and sweep the dirt so that it is smooth. While I admit, it is more aesthetically appealing this way, and occasionally bits of rubbish are also swept up in this process, it's hard to see how sweeping twigs off the dirt makes the dirt "clean."

And this practice is not reserved to inside the compound. Whenever we set up meetings at work, or give oven-building, business training, or leadership workshops, under trees that are well outside the compounds (and even too far away to really be considered in the "yard" of the compounds) we must always first sweep all the leaves and sticks and rocks and everything that isn't dirt out from under the tree where the women will be sitting.

So clearly, in this cultural conception of cleanliness, dirt and dust can be made clean, but even sanitized hands are not clean if there is still dirt or dust on them.

Do I disagree?

I don't even know.