Friday afternoon....seemed like any other ordinary day here in Taiwan. Minding my business, meeting with people, getting some work done. In the midst of normal, crazy walked into my apartment building.
Our second floor neighbors have some cleanliness issues. Serious cleanliness issues. They have piles of bags of something unidentified that have been in our stairwell for 2+ years and have never moved. Their living room is one big pile of junk/garbage with a small pathway through it. They own a dog....a very stinky dog who they also let out "secretly" at night to pee in the stairway cuz that's easier than taking him for a walk. They also chew and spit out beetle nut, also on these lovely stairs. These people are a constant source of frustration to me. When we have guests over, we have to apologize for the journey up the stairs to the apartment. Some friends run as fast as they can so that it can be over quickly.
So.....back to the crazy (yeah....we haven't even gotten to the crazy part yet!). While my roommate was waiting at the bottom of the stairs for a friend, a man who was "not all together there" walked into the building and tried loudly and quite adamantly to try to get into the first floor apartment. He must have known these people. When he couldn't get in, he dropped trou and went diarrhea ALL OVER the landing in front of the first floor apartment. He came running back down, poo down his legs and took off, leaving his poo in the hallway, which soon sent odors all the way up to our fifth floor apartment. I showed up at home just a few minutes after this all happened....there was no way to avoid the stinky lake of diarrhea. You had to walk in it to get up the stairs.
I was so frustrated I left....I spent the rest of the afternoon just boiling up with frustration inside. I arrived home 6 hours later to find nothing had changed, and the paper towels my roommate had put down so that you could somehow get beyond the poo-river, had been strewn all over and the other people in the building had just walked through this and scattered the poop up and down the stairs. and I can't even begin to describe how disgusting the smell was. I couldn't eat anything all day.
I don't get angry very easily...frustrated yes, but not angry. This made me so, so ANGRY. I was ready to go down and give my neighbors a mouthful of nastiness in English, but my other roommate was home and was not in such a rage so we calmly and quietly went down to ask them to clean it up. The man who lives there came and walked through the middle of the mess, just looked at us, said nothing, walked into his apartment (shoes still on....gag) and shut the door.
I didn't get much sleep that night. The angry monster kept my thoughts racing.
Next day, my roommate and I bought 2 bottles of bleach, pulled out some old mops and cleaned our stairwell top to bottom. It took us 2 1/2 hours and we used almost the whole 2 gallons of bleach and countless buckets of water. The "substance" of the poo had been kind of removed sometime during the evening, but there were crusty remnants everywhere.
This turned out to be actually very therapeutic for me. After we had thoroughly cleaned off the "landing of abomination" we just stopped and prayed for our neighbors. In that moment, I got a glimpse of how sad these people's lives are. Their external reality was just a reflection of their internal. They are a mess. They are broken and lost. They are in a really sad and pathetic state. It made me realize that loving my neighbor is not just having a cup of coffee with a really fun university student and sharing about my life and Jesus. Sometimes loving my neighbor means you scrub their crap....sometimes literally. Sometimes loving your neighbor means it costs you and benefits them. Sometimes loving your neighbor means that you have to speak hope into complete hopelessness. I learned a valuable lesson.
And the dog peed on the stairway again that night. Just an ordinary day.
