Welcome to Deep Cleaning!

I think it is time that I tell you about my work of the last weeks. My relation to it gets stronger and stronger every day.

I enjoy the deep cleaning for the third week now. Officially we 'cleaned' all the dishes and gastros during the first week. We had a team from the field to help us, but all this turned out do be some strange kind of disinfecting with a lot of chlorine, but nothing close to the definition of 'deep cleaning'. Anyway, the week passed and we finished everything outside.

The second week we had a nice team of permanents to start inside the kitchen with washing walls, ceilings and floors. And of course our nice big pots which are finally somewhere near shiny now.

I would like to give an overview over our very expensive cleaning products: 

Nettoyor - this is a nice disinfecting product to clean floors outside.
Mainly found in Point 5 and in the washing up area. The liquid is in little plastic bags that can rarely be opened with bare hands. Very practical when in a washing up hurry. The very special Nettoyor smell keeps Taizé memories for a long time. 

Poudre à récurer - Powder to clean sinks or remove black spots from the floor in Big Kitchen. Useless for deep cleaning, unless you are brother Bart. 

Procide H.P. - Also known as the "push push liquid" because of its very strange construction to get the liquid out of the bottle (first open, then push twice, then pour out). Disinfecting --> wear gloves when washing walls.
Used in high concentrated solutions for deep cleaning (walls and ceilings), might cause headaches. "But it's not so bad, that product..." 

Solifour - to be used by boys only for it is very aggressive! Always wear gloves, breathing mask and face protection!! Use Solifour to clean the ovens. Instructions by brother Bart: Whenever fat has to be removed, spray Solifour on it, wait ten minutes and then it can be removed easily. Always those theories! 

Progress - Ferenc: Ah, we have a new, very expensive product - Progress. It is to remove fat, but it is not as aggressive as Solifour [thus is can also be used by girls]. But it is not disinfecting so we have to wash everything with Procide afterwards. Time is something we don't have...
One day, brother Bart stepped into the kitchen and saw us cleaning with the rough green sponges.
"Don't use the green sponges, you will get scratches everywhere on the pot.
They are very expensive."
-"But otherwise it won't get clean. It's a deep cleaning, you know..."
"Ya, just put Solifour on it, wait for ten minutes and it will be fine."
*thinking* Dear brother, please try this yourself!!
-"But we don't use Solifour, Ferenc told us to use Progress
"Ah, this is stupid, use Solifour!" 
Two days later, Ferenc said to Ina: "Oh, you are cleaning the oven, with Solifour?! But this is actually for the boys..."  At that point we were lost and confused. :-) 
Now we decided to spray Progress everywhere, use the green sponges and even knives where necessary and throw everything into a secret corner as soon as brother Bart steps into the room. 

Techno – another very new and expensive product, used for final floor and drain cleanings. Techno is a fungi fighter.

Our bible study of this week was about Mark 13:33-37. Brother Jean-Marie admitted that he had only 15 minutes to prepare this study so we ended up speaking about night working (not party!!) experiences, trying to explain the different parts of the night as they are mentioned in verse 35. The brother told us he never had such an experience and so he listened to our stories for about 20 minutes.

When we tried to plan how we are going to finish the deep cleaning this week we found out that it would not be possible. After all it's a DEEP cleaning and we are very German on that.

So we decided to make a night shift and invited brother Jean-Marie to have a beautiful night working experience (between evening and morning prayer) in Big Kitchen. But he was not too enthusiastic about it.  

When I'm not having fun in Big Kitchen I work with the decoration for Milano. I have no idea how we going to finish all the paintings and pillars and all the other stuff we have to paint orange but I am sure not even brother Stephen knows :-) 

We even had the first snow this week although it disappeared after a beautiful day of sunshine. 

And we found out that brother Etienne forbids the boys to have rubbish bin in their toilet in Petite Morada. Some of the rules here seem to be quite strange... *g* 

By the way, there is another French sentence everybody here understands: Ce n'est pas possible! And a teacher wrote me after my last email that she maybe could "invite" students to test to be a bit more welcoming in school :-) this is so nice...