Laundry

We have become pretty good at doing our own laundry, although we continue to improve upon our technique with each load. Basically you fill up three large metal buckets with water, the first one with detergent and the other two for rinsing. (It wasn’t until much later that we found the joys of soaking our clothes in soapy water overnight and fabric softener in the last rinse). The washboard (a sanded wooden 2x4 usually hand-made by the family) is used in the first bucket, where the clothes are scrubbed as best as possible. At first, Kelli had trouble learning to use the washboard and decided to use her hands to scrub the clothes instead. Big mistake! She wore band-aids on her knuckles for the next week. Since then she has forced herself to learn to use the washboard. The clothes are then rung and transferred to the other buckets to be rinsed and wrung again. The frustrations lie in the fact that the water in the first bucket quickly turns to brown as the combination of wind, sand and lots of walking reeks havoc on clothes and the last two buckets quickly become filled with soapy water so eventually nothing is getting cleaned or rinsed. Due to water shortages, we cannot continually keep refilling our buckets. We make due by using a rotation, transferring the first rinse bucket to the washing bucket, the second rinse bucket to the first rinse and dumping the muddy soap bucket, refilling it and using it as the second rinse. It seems to work, and we know that our clothes are just going to get dusty the minute we put them back on anyway! The clothes are then hung on the clothesline which sounds pretty simple, but not when you are pressed for space and have a limited number of clothespins. Joe has gotten very creative with the clothesline, sometimes hanging multiple garments from a single clothespin. The last big trick is getting the laundry done in time so that the clothes can dry before dark. If you leave your clothes hanging up overnight, there is a pretty big chance that they won’t be there in the morning. There have been many nights where our damp clothes have been spread all over our small bedroom.

pictures: The washing MACHINE!; out to dry