Greetings and Happy Midweek,
I hope your week is going along smoothly. My time has been very focused as I have been busy ‘downsizing’ things I put in storage over a year ago, hoping to reduce the space my belongings take up while better using what I have and having better access to important things which are currently buried ‘somewhere’ in all that stuff!
So I thought we could reflect this week on how people around the world sort and store things. Take for instance junkyards. In Senegal, on the outskirts of town or in industrial areas, junkyards are at first glance sprawling, chaotic piles or even small mountains of ‘junk’. But one large yard along a congested road I often used came into better focus as, when sitting in traffic, I would gaze into the yard. Over time and with increasing interest, I realized instead of a confused jumble, the whole place was a warren of carefully sorted, meticulously positioned piles of like objects - rusty round gadgets, worn out tires, similar lengths of discarded steel. Intrigued, I started noticing other junkyards and they too were really well organized! I would try to figure out at times what each pile had in common. Not necessarily things I’d put together - but in fact, yes, things which shared some feature like shape or size or even the “unlike anything else’ piles!
I smile to myself as I remember what fun it became for me to happen upon a junkyard, with its clever catalogue of bits and pieces, ready for future users to come by and "access the things they found important" in the midst of all that stuff”!
How about you ~ what is a cross-cultural ‘sorting’ experience you have had?
Share about that with a friend or note it here.
And stay tuned in coming weeks for cross-cultural explorations of the recycling and re-purposing of all that ‘junk’!
Until next week,
Betsy
Global SKILLs LINKs
Since I’m knee deep in my sorting this week, rather than spend time finding new links, I invite you to go back over some previous ones of interest to you in these posts! ...or maybe take some time sorting your own neglected jumble - it’s hard to get started but very rewarding to get done!
2021 ~ Celebrating 40 years of working in
intercultural communications and global community building
Connecting, Collaborating, Cultivating Community