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Comprehensive Prolonged Project

Day 2^nd:Accommodating in the hostel.

The room in the hostel is at your disposal. You share it with two students from Brazil. Now you are trying to make it cosy. Describe what you would do to make it comfortable.

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

Mr. and Mrs. Turvey both hated housework. They were a very untidy couple who never put things away. When they went to bed, for example, they always left their clothes in a mess on the floor. Their kitchen was a mess, too. Even though they had a dishwasher, they always left the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink and only did the washing-up when there wasn’t a clean plate to be found in the house. It was the same with their clothes. They never put them into the washing machine until there was nothing else left to wear. The living room always looked as though a bomb had just gone off. There were things everywhere. There was thick dust on every piece of furniture and the carpet had not been cleaned for weeks. And the bathroom!

One day, when Mr. Turvey couldn’t find one of his shoes, and Mrs. Turvey couldn’t see her face in the bathroom mirror they decided it was time to get the house cleaned. So they found Marie, a foreign student at a local language school, who needed some extra money.

Marie came to the house and worked all day long. She washed and dried all the clothes. Then she got out the iron. She ironed the clothes, folded them neatly and put them away. She swept all the dust off the floors with a large broom. She took a wet cloth and wiped the dust off every surface in the house and then polished the furniture until it was shining. She got out the vacuum cleaner and cleaned all the carpets. In the kitchen the floor was filthy. It was too dirty to wash with a mop. So Marie got on her hands and knees and scrubbed the dirt off with a scrubbing brush. Finally she made the bed and, when she had finished, the house looked spotless.

Mr. and Mrs. Turvey came home that evening. There was nothing on the floor. There was no dust on the furniture. The wood was shining and you could smell the polish. In their bedroom all their clothes were neat, clean and tidy. “So what do you think?” Mrs. Turvey asked her husband. “It looks nice and tidy,” he said, “but how are we ever going to find anything?”

Marking territory.

In everyday language we talk of 'my place', 'our home' and 'their neighbourhood'. We think of our home as our own private territory. People need a place of their own, where they can get away from others and feel a sense of being in charge. Even within families, we attach ourselves to personal territories: for example, the kitchen tends to 'belong' to the one who prepares the meals. We like to have our own bedrooms and personalise them to emphasise that they are ours.

Within the home, territorial boundaries depend on the level of intimacy of different rooms and spaces. On the doorstep and in the hall we meet strangers and people making deliveries. Friends and relatives are invited into the living-room or kitchen, but rarely are people from outside the immediate family admitted to an adult's bedroom.

Personalising our territories shows how attached we feel to them. A study of American university dormitories showed how personalisation of students' spaces was related to their sense of belonging to the university as a whole. The investigators counted the number of personal items in the students' rooms, such as posters, stereos and rugs, and found that the students who dropped out had the least number of personal items on display.

The same thing is true of neighbourhoods. Look around you in your own neighbourhood. Look at the houses or flats that show personalisation: new fences and boundary markers, door colours that stand out from the rest or freshly painted window frames. Noting how territories are marked should allow you to predict who is most likely to stay and become involved in the community.

When getting established in a new town or country, uprooted people are likely to put up pictures of their old home. The greater the number of local objects they put on display, however, the more likely they are to stay and form relationships in their new community.