Shana Tova! (airing out some dirty laundry)

Happy (almost) New Years from Paraguay! Apparently, despite the fact that I have definitely written two whole blog posts over the past 2 months, I never actually uploaded them...whoops. Since I am now using internet at the city near my site, San Juan Bautista, I of course, don´t actually have a copy of these posts at hand. I have to wake up at 5:30 in the morning to take the bus into town, which means that I generally forget half of the things I need to bring with me, 5:30am is not the best time of day for me. So, in short, I will have two new (old) posts up sometime this month.

Today, I would like to talk about laundry. Once upon a time, when I moved to Jerusalem, Israel, I had remember having a panicked conversation with my roommates. Despite the fact that we lived pretty near the downtown, it would be a half-an-hour walk to the nearest laundrymat. How were we going to clean our clothes? We also had no car, and lived in a 4th floor apartment, so arranging for a 2nd hand laundry machine to make it to our doorstep was going to be complicated. Those things are heavy. In the end, Leora worked her magic, and we ended up with a great 2nd hander on our utility balconey.

One day, while preparing to do my laundry (in Paraguay),  I remembered that conundrum and began to giggle. How was I EVER going to clean my clothes without a laundry machine??? Any woman in my community would find that question pretty ridiculous. So how do you do laundry without a laundry machine--I now know the answer:

Required Tools:

• At least one bucket. Two is preferable
• A water source (luckily my community does have running water, but you can also get the water from a well).
• Bar of soap
• Scrub brush
• wood tabla (can be as basic as a 1ft squared board, about 3 inches thick, but a wooden slab bench or table is preferable)
• section of fencing (note, if fence is not barb-wire, you might need clothespins)

Steps:

1. Fill up bucket part way with clothes and then add enough water to submerge and soak clothes.
2. For non-jeans and non-socks, pick up wet item of clothes, and rub bar of soap onto cloth in multiple places. Grab a handful of material in each hand and scrub together, repeat in multiple locations. 
3. For jeans and socks: spread wet sock or jeans flat across tabla, and apply soap by running across each flat side of material. Then, use scrub brush to scrub material, moving down the length of the tabla. 
4. Take soapy items one by one and dunk in a bucket of clean water, once or twice, wringing out soapy water. When relatively less soapy (preferably, when water runs clear, but hey, we´re in a drought here! Rinsing until clear takes A LOT of water), wring out water as much as possible, turn clothes inside out, and hang up on your local barb wire fence (or, if you don´t live in rural paraguay, on a clothesline).

Tips:

• you turn the clothes inside out to prevent the sun from bleaching away all the color (well, to slow the process)
• small trees are great places to dry underwear--lots of branches to grab onto, some foliage to camoflauge your collection
• socks are the spawn of the devil, not only are they white, but each one has to be scrubbed individually.
• use the excess water for a greywater system--aka water trees and hardy field crops. Leaf cutter ants do not like when you pour gallons of soapy water down their tunnels. muwhahahaha.
• If you see a large collection of grey clouds in the sky, wait a day to do your laundry...this is where the trouble starts. 
• Always give clothes a good shake before donning. 

The result: in the states, it takes me about three hours to wash 1-2 wks worth of laundry. It takes me about the same amount of time here, except that i get a full arm workout.