Laundry

Laundry is kind of a big deal here.  I didn't realize that a few months ago, when one of my piano students couldn't come to her lesson on a Saturday because she had to wash clothes.  I thought that was a pretty lame excuse, like a girl in an old movie telling the guy on the phone she couldn't go out with him that night because she had to wash her hair.  You can do laundry any time, right?  

Well, we can do laundry any time, because we have an automatic washer.  Not so with most people in the Philippines.  In all likelihood, my piano student had to wash her clothes by hand.  Maybe all her family's clothes.  Maybe even other people's clothes that she's been hired to wash.  This is no small task.  It involves filling a large basin with tepid water from an outdoor faucet, or from a pump, using a bar of laundry soap, and rubbing the clothes clean on a scrubbing board or maybe with a brush, wringing them out by hand, dumping and refilling the basin with clean water, rinsing them out, wringing them again, maybe repeating that rinse-and-wring part, and hanging them to dry.  Of course, after they're dry, they'll need to be ironed.  

This pump has a spigot that swings from side to side, so they can fill their basins where they are, without having to move them.  I was impressed with how fast these ladies work.

Some people do wash their clothes in the river, and we've seen clean laundry spread out on the gravel to dry.

You can buy a washer in the Philippines, as I've said.  Of course, they're not cheap and many people can't afford them.  They're also not very large.  Ours is about the biggest I've seen here, and it's much smaller than our washer at home.  A washer here may or may not be automatic.  You might have to fill it with a bucket.  And it might have two tubs, side by side -- one for washing and one for spinning.  Another option is to buy just a spinner, a machine that does only the 'spin' part of a wash cycle.  That's quite a savings over buying a washer and might be tempting if you had a lot of towels and jeans to wring out.  Imagine how long they must take to dry on a clothesline on a humid day!  (And every day is humid in the Philippines.)  But I know someone who owns a spinner but doesn't use it much because it makes her power bill too high.

One other option is to hire a lady to do your laundry, and many missionaries do that.  It's not expensive.  We haven't, as yet.  We do have a washer, and a nice rack inside, where we hang our laundry on coat hangers to dry,  and a clothesline outside, to use on dry days.  We are having to do a lot more ironing here, without an electric dryer to tumble our clothes.  But it hasn't been too burdensome, so far, so we do it ourselves. 

The water here is extremely hard, by the way.  Your clothes come out feeling like they've been starched, and towels are downright scratchy.

But everywhere you go, there's laundry hanging, often right out by the road . . .  on a clothesline . . .

 . . . on any sort of fence . . .

(This one is one of our church fences.)

 . . . balconies and rooftops . . . 

Laundry . . . it's just part of the landscape!