Good hygiene is very crucial to our health. How clean you live determines if diseases stay away from you.
Does wealth determine one's hygiene?
My friend and my cousin had this argument a few days ago on our way to get food.
It all started when one of the children who begged at the school's main gate came to us to beg and held my cousin's hand.
She shouted “Jesus” and withdrew her hand immediately.
My friend and I started laughing at her, but it was serious. She held her hand out like it was touched by a plague, and we bought water for her to wash her hand before she kept it in her pocket the entire time.
I didn't blame her or anything, because the child was really dirty. You didn't need to look twice to see it.
But I just thought out loud and said, “It's not their fault, though, if they had the money, they wouldn't be as dirty as that."
“What do you mean?!" My cousin and friend faced me immediately.
“Don't make any excuses for them, neatness has nothing to do with money," they started to argue with me.
At first, I tried defending my statement until my friend gave me an example of a mentally unstable man she saw once bathing under the rain.
Then I realized that the only thing money can do is increase the level of neatness. I only said ‘increase neatness’ and didn't say ‘increase dirtiness’ because anything that has to do with being dirty is from the mentality.
When I talk about the level of hygiene, I mean something like this;
Someone can be a clean person and at the same time not use any deodorant or perfume because the person doesn't have the money for it.
I can remember one of my aunts. Back then, before she got married to my uncle, every time she came to visit the family during holidays, she looked so smart, even the times she visited in her youth corps uniform, clothes always pressed, white, sparkling clean, and she smelled so good.
But after she got married to my uncle and he started making a lot of money, she changed. The next time I saw her, she was so lazy and dirty. Someone who used to hand wash her and her children's clothes now had their clothes looking like rags, but now she had two washing machines and home appliances that made being clean easier. They lived in a modern house, but I preferred my grandma's old house a hundred times because I couldn't stand how dirty the house was. So why did she get so dirty? Did she get lazy over time? We don't know, but one thing we know is that she had a lot of money.
On the other hand, my mom always taught my siblings and me good hygiene habits right from a young age. And although my mom is a very neat woman I wouldn't deny noticing the improvements in the neatness in our house, and our hygiene habits improved as our finances improved.
Like when we used a broom to sweep the house, we only swept once a day. But when we got a sweeping brush, I liked sweeping twice a day because the brush made it easier for me.
So does wealth determine hygiene?
Yes… and no.
I believe, like many other things, hygiene can only be influenced by money to an extent but wealth isn't what makes one dirty or neat.
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