laundry day

Today is "Laundry Day! The day our dirty clothes get clean!" (to be said in a super hero voice). With 4 kids, potty accidents, and a clean sheet fetish we do lots of laundry and I like to do it all in one day. I don't really mind laundry all that much - dirty to clean, disorder to order, a few days of the kids being able to wear their favorite clothing items, but it is a big job and sometimes I forget to be grateful for the wonderful machines that do the work for me. You see, I served a mission in Honduras and Belize - both third world countries with third world laundry. I did my own laundry in all but one area (Bless that woman - it was worth every penny paid). I keep this picture framed in my laundry room to remind me that no matter how much laundry I have to load, fold, iron, and put away, it is NOTHING compared to third world laundry.

Laundry in third world Latin countries is an art/science passed down from mother to daughter (men DO NOT do laundry).

First - fill tank (that think on my right). Sometimes you had to turn the faucet on the night before and it would drip all night to fill the tank because the water supply was sketchy.

Second - for sheets, fill a bucket with water, detergent, bleach and sheets. Mix up and let it sit.

Third - For normal clothes. Take a piece of clothing onto the board. With the small blue bucket scoop water onto it and then take your blue block of laundry soap and rub the garment all over

Forth - Scrub the heck out of your clothes on the ridges of the wash board - lather, lather, lather

Fifth - with the little blue bucket, rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse, and rinse (this is where the lazy gringas were different than our companions from central America) They would then do softener and even more rinsing!

Sixth - place in a bucket with the rest of the clean clothes

Seventh - Ring the living daylights out of your clothes with your hands

Eighth - Hang to dry and hope it does not rain. Honduras is VERY hot and humid and sunny most of the year and the hot and sunny usually beat out the humidity and get the clothes dry in about 30 minutes. When it's rainy or the few weeks it gets really cold - just give up hope of dry clothes and wear them wet.

Ninth - remove sheets from bucket, rub with blue soap, a section at a time, rinse a section at a time without getting the clean part on the ground or back in the soap. Fact - sheets are a royal pain to wash by hand and really hard to ring out. You may ask, "Why wash them every week then?" Curse that McKay upbringing. McKays are into clean sheets. My great grandmother even changed her pillowcase every day.

We usually did not iron on the mission because 1- it was so humid your clothes just went limp anyway and 2 - landladies were usually concerned about the amount of electricity used in ironing.

So, there you have it - third world laundry and the reason I truly LOVE my machines. I cannot imagine doing all our laundry that way now.