About occupations called “dirty”
Good evening!
It's not a Buddhist question at this time, but since there is a risk that aggressive responses to nurses will come on some famous Q&A site, I thought it would be safe to ask questions here where the respondent's identity is correct. I would be happy if I could hear stories from a Buddhist perspective from a monk.
The question is, “It is said that jobs such as taking care of patients are dirty or low in status, but are they despised?”
This seems to come from the history of nurses in the old days, but I read comments on one site that nurses are middle school graduates and have become the kind of girls who live and work, and that a young lady wouldn't do it. Young ladies also excrete, and I don't think it's possible to live without getting involved in dirty things for the rest of their lives. They're all human, too.
Incidentally, I'm not a nurse, and I specialize in fields that don't touch patients' bodies. However, I had wiped and washed patients' bodies at the hospital before, so far from being disgusting, it was fun. I was doing it like OK, I'll clean it up ♪.
I changed my specialty because I didn't want to destroy my body due to physical labor after I got older, so when I said I avoided that kind of work, I avoided it too... but I'm not making a fool of it.
Apart from that, I don't think that if you do a job that people don't like, you'll be rewarded, but I wasn't really convinced when I saw that it's an occupation where you get qualifications by doing specialized studies and that it's a lowly job even though it's useful to people.