flashback friday

(note: I wrote this for Southern Cross' blog a few weeks ago. EVERY time I do laundry, I think about washing clothes in the dirty Urabamba River....here's the flashback... )

My sister's clothes dryer broke down this week and she's been having a hard time getting someone out to fix it. Normally, she tries to do at least one load a day. With 3 kids and a husband, you can imagine how her laundry is piling up. After spending almost 3 hours in the laundromat her first time, we decided she'd use our dryer.

I can't convince her to just drop off her dirty laundry and let me do both the washing and the drying so she washes a few loads, puts 2 loads of washed clothes in a hamper thing, loads them into her SUV and drives them down to me. I dry them, fold them and she picks them up when she drops off her next 2 loads of wet clothes.

It's quite a process, but we've got it down. And it's fun seeing my sister every couple of hours throughout a day. But it did make us wonder, "how did mom do it with SIX kids?"

But I still say doing laundry for a family of eight has nothing on the experiences I had doing laundry down in Peru. Have you ever done laundry for 30+ kids in a third-world country that doesn't have a washing machine, clothes dryer let alone RUNNING WATER?


Let me tell you, THAT is a process. I remember just getting all the kids together with the laundry bags and their laundry tubs was an exhausting task. Then we paraded down the hill about a mile carrying these heavy bags of clothes. Then we washed EACH piece of clothing one by one in freezing river water. The first time we didn't even have enough tubs or hand brushes to go around. And let me tell you, it goes a lot quicker when you have brushes. When you don't, you just hold fabric in each fist and rub the fabric together. The kids would laugh because my fingers were all cut up.
After we got the clothes all washed and rinsed in the (not so clean) river water, we twist and twist the clothes to get as much water out before we hauled the wet clothes back up the hill a mile. Did you know that wet clothes are MUCH heavier than dry clothes?

Then we'd hang the clothes out to dry for the day on a barb-wired fence which explained all the little holes in the kids' clothes.

So yes, it's a total pain for my sister to bring her wet clothes to me, but she's got nothing on those Peruvian kids.