A day in the life of a janitor

The answers of janitor Elsa Alvarez were translated from Spanish by head janitor Margie DeLeon.

Every morning, Elsa Alvarez and thousands of students walk through the same doors and enter the same school. They have laughed, worked and made friends under one roof, been to the same bathroom and some of the same classrooms. But one could say they lead gapped lives that touch only at the tables in the cafeteria or the hallways of B and E block.

Alvarez has been a janitor at Coppell High School for 17 years. She lived in El Salvador when she was young, but came to the United States in 1981 to work. I try dusting her mind for the wild greens and pure blues of a tucked childhood zipping free down blurs of beaches and volcanic island ash, a splash perhaps for the mute walls of the custodians’ small room. Yet although she says she has many memories, she can not remember any of them clearly anymore.

“A relished childhood moment, anything?” I ask.

But she still does not recall much of El Salvador, and when I ask her if she misses it at all, her answer comes without thought and need of translation from Spanish, “No.” She is used to Carrollton, where she lives, and it has been her home for decades following a faded birthplace.

Alvarez has to come to school everyday at 11:30 a.m., a time students would not mind for stumbling into first period.

But Alvarez leaves school at midnight. Expressing shock at the hours of her shift, I ask, “Do you not want to work some place else?” She laughs, a second universal intonation that I can understand, but still surprises.

She says she is very happy working at CHS, and I do not see any doubt of that in her cheerful face.

After waking up in the morning, Alvarez cooks for herself and her husband, who she lives with, since her children are now grown and adults themselves. Once she comes back home, it is the quiet crest of night and she is of course tired from a long – without a doubt – day’s work. But Alvarez does not let the working days that stray into night keep her from having time to enjoy simple things. When she does have time, she says, she likes to go shopping and dancing.

I ask Alvarez what have been the worst and best days of her life; she says everyday is a good day for her. “Would you change anything about your life if you could?”

She says she would have studied and gone to school. Alvarez only completed school until third or fourth grade, and her dream now is to be young again and have a chance at an education. She says she would not mind being a student here like the thousands who eat at the cafeteria she sweeps and walk through the hallways she travels everyday.

No matter her free and unfaulting positivity, Alvarez says sometimes it gets hard cleaning the school. Students forget there are people behind the trash that will ultimately disappear, and when Alvarez is faced with the dirt, scraps of paper and unending sweeps of her mop, she feels upset.

But she knows she has to clean it anyway, and gets through it everyday.

And although she loves her job, Alvarez says she sometimes gets bored doing the same thing over and over again. “Do you have any friends that make it easier?”

She has a bunch, she replies, right now laughing with head custodian Margie DeLeon.

Alvarez says she has no dreams anymore; she is later into her life and is happy with what she has lived. “What makes you happiest now?” I ask.

DeLeon translates for me,“Just coming to work and knowing that she does everything for herself by herself. She doesn’t have to depend on anyone for anything.”

“Is she proud of that?” I ask.

“Oh yes. She is very proud of that.”