As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I spent last year teaching English to college students in China. I was sent over by my Alma mater, which sends three recent grads a year to one particular university in China, in Henan province. It’s in a very poor area so my experiences aren’t necessarily indicative of the rest of China, but they aren’t encouraging.

So we (the three Americans teaching at this uni last year) were supposed to give some advice to the people who were applying to replace us. I kept coming up with a million things to say to them, but I never did.

I was thinking about it and I didn’t say anything to the people applying because I didn’t know how to be honest without completely scaring everyone away. I came up with a list of ten things that could make anyone not take this job. Then I realized that there was one thing that could do that alone.

This requires a bit of cultural info first - sewer pipes here can’t handle toilet paper, so everyone just throws toilet paper away in the trash. Also, girls don’t ever wrap their used pads up in toilet paper before they throw them away. So the trash is UBER disgusting.

So, the building where I taught some of my classes, the Foreign Language building, is a large, five story building designed around a courtyard with balconies and stuff. The school, being really poor, doesn’t hire enough people to to janitorial work around the campus, no one comes around and dumps out the trash cans. Instead, when the cans are full students just take the trash cans and dump them over the balcony.

The courtyard area below has this giant pile of all the trash from the semester. Toilet paper, used pads, etc. It has rats crawling over it, flies flying around it, and smells like you wouldn’t BELIEVE.  It gets rained on. It only gets cleaned up at the end of every semester, and only then. So during semesters it rises to about waist deep and is the size of a badminton court, approximately.

Another teacher told me that the smell is really bad on most of the floors, but is better on the 5th floor where I taught. This was because it was closest to the opening, so most of the smell just rises up and out.

This one time, I was leaning near a balcony waiting for the photocopy people to get back. I was unfortunate enough to be around when someone was dumping the trashcan out. Subesquently, I was almost hit in the face with a used maxi pad heading towards the pile.

And I was almost not surprised.