Current Release: September 11th, 2007 | Vol. XXIV Iss. 10

Photos By lauren perry

Keepers of the House

By Lauren Perry

laperry@vwc.edu

It is Monday morning and the weekend has just passed. Every Wesleyan student is familiar with the sight. We all weave around the same broken bottles and stare in awe at the massive amounts of beer cans that litter our grounds.

And then we continue on our way to class. Usually by the time we get back around to our rooms, the piles of beer cans and cardboard remnants of cases have been replaced with rows upon rows of plastic bags, slumped over and heavy with that vile, poisonous bottom-of-the-trash-bag liquid. We take extra precaution to sidestep those bags.

We don’t have to fill them. We don’t have to carry them away.

It’s the group of housekeepers sitting cheerfully in the lounge area of the apartments who have done that for us. These four ladies have just spent their morning hours scrubbing and wiping, mopping and sweeping, wrapping the top of filled and often sticky trash bags and replacing them with new ones. It’s this group of ladies that know the bottom-of-the-trash-bag truth about our campus and its grime.

“They tear it up,” said Shirley Pitchford, a housekeeper who takes care of North and South halls.

“They’re great kids. You can’t help but care about your floor. Even my boys on North – I love them – but they just tear it up.”

And by “tear it up”, she means more than just a dirty floor.

“VIII is the worst place,” said housekeeper Portia Spence. Betty Spence (no relation) agreed.

“This place,” she said, “there’s trash and broken bottles everywhere.”

“They’ll leave trash in the hallways of the apartments for a week,” said Marge Murray, the last of the quartet. Students are supposed to carry their own trash and recycling outside to the dumpsters. “They tear down exit signs and lights,” Murray continued, “kick in vents, pull down ceiling tiles. We have to call Anthony.”

The women looked over at the snoozing figure on the far couch. Anthony Daniels looked exhausted. It was 10:30 in the morning.

“He does everything here,” said Pitchford. “Cleans the security office and the physical plant and picks up all of the trash all over campus.”

So that’s where those rows of white trash bags go.

“We clean every day,” continued Pitchford, looking down the hall of the first floor apartments. “The halls smell from beer.”

Murray laughed as she eyed the elevator.

“The elevator is terrible,” she said. “They pour beer on the floor, kick the walls. There’s spit running down the walls.”

“Oh, the spitters,” Portia said, and the four women all laughed. Despite the fact that they were complaining about the problems that they have to take care of, the housekeepers were all smiles and laughs, as if it was no big deal.

The dishes can be one of the most frustrating problems that they may face.

“Almost all the suites have dishes stacked,” said Murray. The old policy of Virginia Wesleyan was that housekeepers could throw away the dishes after a while. But that was then, and this is now.

“We’re not supposed to do dishes,” said Pitchford, “but it makes the whole suite smell.”

And the women often find their complaints go unheard. “There’s water in them, with grease all over it,” said Portia. “It smells so bad. I don’t feel like I have an RA who I can go to and talk to about problems. They won’t do a thing about it – I’ve asked RAs, everyone.”

But Pitchford stood up for her halls.

“All my RAs are good, always,” she asserted. But she added, “I wish they would call me Shirley.”

Portia laughed. “They can call me Grandma Portia,” she said. “I’ve got grandkids older than them.”

Betty had an idea why students can be so careless of their environment.

“It’s bad raising at home,” she said. “They don’t know how to clean up after themselves. Sometimes

I’ll gather eight, nine, or ten bags from just one floor. It only took half a bag for one floor after the holiday, and we hadn’t cleaned for almost a week then.”

The women nodded and agreed with her, bouncing off of each other with a variety of stories, all of them centered around the destructive VIII.

“They put beer cans, beer bottles, food and trash with food in it, like pizza boxes, all in the recycling,” said Portia.

Food or drinks in a recycling bin contaminate the entire bin, so that all of that recycling must then be thrown out, because of something like a pizza box or a bottle with beer still in it.

“We can do some serious cleaning,” said Pitchford. “Just shows you how much they care, when you come back the next day and its trashed.”

Her three friends nodded solemnly, as if their work was in vain.

“They think we’re supposed to do everything,” said Portia. “I don’t mind dirt, that’s my job. But when they do unnecessary things, it makes my job so hard. And the ones that do do it make it hard for the ones that don’t. I’ve had students apologize to me before.”

The ladies all had advice to part with that they think would help make their job a little easier.

“Work with your housekeeper,” said Pitchford. “We want the floor to be nice and clean, to have a better environment. We want both of us to keep it that way – it works both ways.”

Portia just wishes that she could see some support.

“I know how college life can be,” she said. “I just want them to succeed. I do love them. I went to say goodbye for Thanksgiving, but most of them had already left.”

Murray bestows a message that rings all the way from kindergarten.

“You made it, you clean it up,” she said simply. “We know you have parties. Just clean up after yourselves.”

“I love my boys, all of them,” said Portia, wanting to get the message across. “I just want them to do better.”