Dirty Laundry

How much clothing do you wear in a week? How do you wash your clothes?

Some of my friends never knew how to wash their own laundry until they arrived at college and realized it was time to learn before they started walking around barefoot in the snow of Buffalo, New York. They learned to pile their dirty laundry into a basket, carry it to the washer, and proceed to pour laundry detergent and clothing into the washing machine. They pulled out the dial to start the washer, went to complete another task until the machine finished its duty, and then transferred the clothing into the dryer machine to dry.

Maria gathered her clothing in her arms and walked up the stairs to the rooftop of her Chiapas home. She took the bar of soap she had purchased at a shop down the street and filled a small bucket with water. The next step was to labor over the dirty clothing for over an hour. She stood at a makeshift sink and scrubbed, rung out the clothing, and hung it to dry on the line. During this process, she periodically peered at the sky to make sure no clouds were rolling in. She depended on her hands to wash and on the sun to dry.

Amina squatted over the basin of water that she had retrieved from the nearby stream in her rural Tanzanian village. She picked up the small bar of soap that she had bought in the main village on market day. As she washed one of the two sets of clothing of each person in the family, she hummed a song and began to sweat from the beating sun. A few yards away, her mother peeled cassava. A dog tried its chances with her soapy water. She washed vigorously by hand, rung out the water that soon became quite dirty, and hung the clothing on a line to dry.

These are a few examples of the ways that people around the world take care of washing the clothes they wear. Such differences can easily escape our awareness. We in the United States can easily get caught up in the race and forget those who work so hard around the world – including those who put so much energy into what we may deem such a simple task.