Today is laundry day. Generally, that chore gets done twice a week. When I was here in March, it appeared to be a straightforward task: wash the clothes hang them on the clotheslines on the roof, take them down at the end of the day. Of course, with approximately 10 people in the house, it took a long time, even with the youngsters doing most of their own. Most of the time the clothes were dry by the end of the day, but the humidity could have complicated that, occasionally leaving them damp around the edges.
Now, in September, we are in the rainy season. The original plan to wash clothes on Tuesday of this week had to change due to a hard morning rain. Wednesday started out much better, but rains came in the afternoon. I was inside when they started, so am not quite sure what happened, but when I heard the rain I thought about the many times Mom and we kids ran out to the clothesline on the farm in the rain, taking down the clothes and bringing them inside to dry.
Since the clothes dry in the sun, they are hung up and folded inside-out to help prevent fading. I need to get used to this habit, because I have found myself putting clothes on wrong side out.
In the months since I wrote the paragraphs above I have had more opportunity to observe laundry day, and I find that it is a little more complicated than I thought. As you can see from the picture below, it takes several big washpans to do laundry. White clothes are put in a separate pan that contains a bit of bleach. They soak there for a few minutes before being dumped into the soapy water.
The especially dirty things--cleaning cloths, bath mats, etc. get washed with one bar of soap and then dumped into soapy water where they are scrubbed with another bar. In addition, both of those pans contain water to which powdered detergent has been added.
All of the clothes eventually end up in the rinse pan, where they are swished, rung out, and then tossed into yet another washpan or bucket to be transported to the clothesline. Everybody seems to know the process. In the early part of this year, there was a lot of laundry, because they were also washing clothes from Sara & Doveney's storage bins. When friends of the family dropped by, they would help scrub or rinse the clothes.
Some folks are not blessed with a clothes line. They spread the wet clothes on bushes, trees, or even the grass to dry.
Since my washing machine has not yet been hooked up--it needs a hose--Viviane is doing my laundry. I am hoping that she finds it simpler than at Dela's house, since it is just for one person. I only bought two wash pans, so I don't know how that is working for her--she comes while I'm at school. Which is a good thing. I have clotheslines in front of the house, but that is also where I park the car, so if the car is there, it limits the space on the line. Otherwise, the clothes would touch the car, which is usually very dusty.
I was excited about my clotheslines at first because I thought that being inside the compound would keep the clothes from picking up the smell from all the cooking over open fires that they get on Dela's roof. Unfortunately, the compound is small and the building on one side is rather tall. Both sunshine and breeze are limited by those factors. That means that some of the clothes don't get dry at all by the end of the day. Which means that I have to spread them out inside until they do. Since it gets humid in the evening, I must be careful not to put them too close to an open window. Otherwise they could get even damper overnight. My plan is to buy a drying rack and another fan and set them up in one of the empty bedrooms. It will be using electricity, but otherwise it can take days!
One final note on laundry. I have never been much of an ironer. I confess, when I was working, I would iron only the front part of the t-shirt or blouse I was wearing, knowing that the rest would be covered by a blazer. I would iron even less if I had to use an iron like this one. It has charcoal inside. Dela told me that she has an electric iron, but if she let the "children" use it, her electric bill would be sky high. I can't imagine doing that much ironing!
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