GIVE: Backward Bucket List #1
Written by: Eileen Maiocco
10/20/2014
Backward Bucket list #1: Spend a week in a septic tank. Check.
Anyone who knows me well is familiar with my bucket list. Yes, it is actually a list, and it fills up several pages of a pocket-sized journal I carry around with me. Like many people’s bucket lists, mine seems to grow longer every time I cross something off it. But for a while there, it felt like I was writing down cool things I was doing just so I could cross them off, which didn’t feel as accomplishing.
So I started something called the Backward Bucket List. Hidden in the last few pages of that same journal, it contains all the cool, noteworthy events from my life that happened before getting the chance to add them to my actual bucket list.
John Lennon said it best:
“Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”
The biggest accomplishment?
Our septic tank.
Inspired by these words, I signed up for a GIVE trip on a whim and took off to Nicaragua for three weeks last May. I crossed a few items off my original bucket list, but by the time I flew home my Backward Bucket List had practically exploded with amazing moments and accomplishments that I never saw coming.
I stood in a septic tank for a week. But before you get too grossed out, you should know that there was no, ehrm… waste in there yet. We were building it, so our bodies and clothes stayed immaculate. …Just kidding – we actually got so filthy we stopped caring, but I had never felt so wonderful in my life.
He went on to use the word grateful to describe himself.
You know, years ago when I was imagining what my life would be like at age eighteen, I never thought some of my proudest, most accomplishing moments would take place at the bottom of a plumbing structure. But that just shows you’ve got to dream big, because I learned things in the bottom of that tank that I couldn’t have learned anywhere else. My friends on Team Septic taught me the art of bottle-packing and the science of the Australian Cement Dance. They taught me how quickly strangers can become friends, and how simple it is to transform trash into tools. They taught me that even in the midst of manual labor on the equator, there is plenty of fun to be had.
I’ll never forget how it felt when Carmen laid the last bottle. We all gathered around the tank, slow clapping and chanting, gaining speed and volume until our thirty-some voices blended into one ecstatic cheer. Everyone was covered in dirt, dripping sweat, and beaming with pride.
When the excitement of the moment had passed and everyone had started walking home, three of us stayed behind to scratch our initials and press our handprints into the drying cement at the bottom of the septic tank. It was only as I walked away that it dawned on me:
