Family Sabbatical
Charlotte Ostermann
February 10, 2005
Dear Readers,
 
I write from Germany, where my family has landed for a semester of sabbatical from my husband’s university work. Carol Ryrie Brink made “Family Sabbatical” sound like such a lark in her now-out-of-print book by that title, so here we are! We’re gradually making many little adjustments to fit in. Cozy goose down comforters eased us through jet lag; new friends from the Focolare Center helped us set up house and look for a van; Russ’ German has carried us through the residence permit process and paved the way for the rest of us to learn at our own pace; and cashiers and ticket-takers have been very patient with us.
We are not yet fully reconciled to the vast recycling rules, however. The extent of our pitiful recycling savvy is ‘newspapers’, ‘glass’, ‘cardboard boxes’ and ‘they don’t have another bin at the handy recycling place, so toss it’. German friends all speak ominously of how important it is to get everything right, but then laugh as though it’s impossible to explain when we prepare ourselves to hear the plan. Russ found a pamphlet that in theory substitutes for friends trying to explain things to you, but instead makes it clear why they find it impossible to explain. We felt victorious and virtuous at our first two weeks of separating paper from foil, and boxes made of waxed paper and lined with foil from everything else, and rinsing yogurt cartons before putting them in ‘plastic’, and taking the corks and metal screw tops off wine and juice bottles before adding to the glass non-landfill bucket. Then Russ took all our bins to the recycling place and found out the five million used Kleenex were not ‘paper’ but some sort of other thing, and the glass should have been further subdivided into brown and green and clear (blue bottles being ‘green’…who knew?) and the corks all separated (of course) to be sent to a town called ‘Cork’ whose motto now is “Cork for Cork” as its claim to fame is recycling the little doobies into cork flooring for a more environmentally friendly Europe.
At any rate, now we’re trying to retrain ourselves to put Kleenex and used napkins into the blue instead of the yellow bucket, the tea bags into the red organic bucket (don’t worry about the staple, the tea bag itself, the string or the paper tag, but keep that foil wrapper in the blue bucket, not red!) and to think of egg cartons not as paper but as ‘carton’ and colored newspaper inserts as carton 1 and not carton 2 and always to keep in mind that the answer is NOT to throw everything in the miniscule to-heck-with-it can that is picked up without inspection only once every two weeks, or to sneak trash out to public anything-goes trash receptacles in the middle of the night. We must persevere and if Germans can do it, we can learn to live like the natives (who got quite a kick out of hearing that at home we load up a dumpster and three auxillary cans every week and expect that to be dealt with for a grand total of five bucks on our monthly utility bill…really, belly laughs!) and become ever so much more ecologically responsible in the process.
Twelve-year-old Joshua is now earning Euros dealing with the ‘recycling center’ that takes up the whole itty bitty teeny garage our van wouldn’t fit into anyway. His dad will drive it all over to the big recycling center manned by folks who have memorized the pamphlet so as to reprimand garbage-creators for infractions. Joshua quickly subcontracted the composting end of things to his eight year old brother Nathan, and set up a confusing array of signs and trash receptacles in the kitchen. It seems like a sort of pollution to me, but I’m trying to come to grips with the necessity of playing by the rules. I’m sure that by the time we leave, in May, we’ll have found a balance between The Environment and the environment of my house. But that will be just in time to move to Rome for a month and learn the Italian recycling rules! This is really a pretty painless way for us to grow in taking a Faith-based approach to environmental issues that involves us more fully in the concerns and lives of our neighbors. Until Italy then, auf wiedersehen!