Employees Must Wash Hands

You’ve seen the signs in the restrooms. “Employees Must Wash Hands.” Thank you, Mr. Restaurant Owner. Being somewhat of a clean freak, I really appreciate your effort at trying to keep your business on the up and up. Heaven knows that it’s a hard business. All you need is one food poisoning outbreak and your reputation and restaurant is history.

If you’re lucky, you’ve been in a restaurant restroom and witnessed a worker come in, do his/her thing, and leave without obeying the sign. And, if you’re smart, you left the restroom and the restaurant – immediately. If you care, you called the manager of the offending place and told them about your experience.

For those of you out there in the food service industry, may I make a suggestion? Can you add two words to that sign? (And make it bigger too, by the way). Please add “and Customers.” That’s right. I think it should read, “Employees and Customers Must Wash Their Hands.”

Didn’t people learn this habit before kindergarten? Where were these offender’s moms? It’s really not a hard concept. Take care of business. Zip. Flush. Wash your hands.

Guys are the worst offenders. They like to act like they’ve mastered the art of number one and then use it to brag on their college. “At (pick your favorite college), they taught us not to pee on ourselves.”

Well, in Mrs. Edmund’s kindergarten class in Belvedere, SC, they taught us to wash our hands – every time you use the bathroom! They didn’t teach us that where I went to college. It was a prerequisite. They figured we already knew that basic principle.

One of my favorite TV shows is Mythbusters. On one episode, they investigated how far urine and fecal matter travels in the bathroom and beyond. If you’re disgusted by that thought, you don’t want to know what they determined. Let’s just say you should put your toothbrush in a plastic zipper bag and stuff it under your mattress. Maybe, just maybe, it won’t get contaminated.

We live in a dirty, disgusting world. When I read through the gospels, I get the impression that Jesus never seemed to be offended by the world’s filth. This is interesting when you consider that he had lived since eternity in heaven, the purest place among all creation. If anything, we should be used to it and he should have been offended. Jesus touched dirty people - lepers, hookers, and adulterers. He wasn’t afraid to be with the dirty fingernails crowd, or those with viruses, fungi, hemorrhaging issues and what not. He came for dirty people. That is his mission.

In 2004, I led a church mission team to Costa Rica for a week. We ran a Bible school in a precario near the capital city of San Jose. A precario is a shanty town filled with families illegally squatting on government land. This particular one had 1800 people on three acres of land. Six, maybe seven, water spigots served the entire community. No sewer system. The streets of the community were always wet since most of the homes ran their sewage out into the street. You didn’t want to wear your nice shoes there.

I, along with the missionaries we served, warned the team repeatedly for months prior to the trip. The precario is dirty. The children are dirty. Don’t wear good shoes or nice clothes. In fact, go buy some old clothes at Goodwill and leave your nice pants at home. Bring hand sanitizer and plenty of sanitary wipes. Don’t pet the dogs. Don’t drink the water. Try to avoid stepping in the water running through the paths and streets of the precario. It’s raw sewage. Go to the health department and get your shots.

They were fairly warned.

As we were wrapping up our first day in the precario, I walked toward the van where we gathered our things to leave for the day. I had been in another area and not aware of what some of the others were doing. I heard laughter and shrieks, adults and children, having a blast hitting a ball. They were playing an impromptu game of volleyball (minus the net) out in the street. The wet street. The street with raw sewage. Unfortunately, the ball hit the ground every once in a while. Okay, it hit the ground often – and it rolled - in the waste water. With no regard to health issues because they were either used to it or ignorant, the children would pick the ball up and punch it back into play and the ladies on our mission team would hit the wet balls with joy.

You know what happens when you hit a wet ball, don’t you? The water sprays back at you when you hit it. My team’s ladies were hitting the ball and being very generously sprinkled with dirty water with each strike. And they did it with a smile. Literally, the water went in their mouths at times. When it did, they covertly spit the contaminants out of their mouths.

You need to understand that these ladies normally live a clean life. Many of them had manicured nails - the French kind with the little white stripe at the end. These ladies were Southern belles from a fairly affluent church in Georgia. Professional women like teachers, nurses, and insurance agents. These were ladies who might leave a restaurant if they saw an employee leave the restroom without washing their hands.

But they didn’t care. The joy that they were bringing to the children and themselves outweighed the chances of getting diarrhea or staying up all night puking. When we finally (after much coercing) convinced them to stop their game so that we could pile into the van to depart, the laughs and filth were everywhere. They each had small black and brown polka dots scattered all over their faces, arms, hands, and shirts.

And they were incredibly happy. They made a memory.

I can’t tell you how the impromptu volleyball game changed those kids’ lives. I don’t know. But I can tell you the names of some women who were changed that day. They reminded us that we have to get out of our comfort zones and get dirty sometimes. Like Jesus did.