It is Lucy’s job to handle most of the laundry in our place. Lucy is employed by Mungai to cook, clean, and do laundry. House help is extremely common in Kenya among anyone who works outside the home. Lucy is very sweet and has been teaching me to make tea and some traditional Kenyan dishes plus she doesn’t laugh at my terrible Swahili. In fact, Lucy and I first bonded when she did our laundry for the first time because she was quite distressed that she couldn’t get M’s socks clean. I assured her that I hadn’t been able to get them clean since the first day he wore them and she sighed and said “oh yes, it’s always like that with boys.” It opened the door for me to ask her about her family, it turns out that her son and M share a name. Small world!
As previously mentioned, modesty is a much bigger deal in Kenya so we wash our own underwear and running clothes each week. She would probably wash them if we mistakenly put them in her pile because she would never correct us but out of respect for her, we wash these things ourselves.
Since this falls solidly under the purview of women’s work, the laundry is my task. Not that M wouldn’t be willing to help but I think Mungai might be so horrified that it’s not worth it.
With few exceptions, washing machines are non-existent in Kenya so all washing is done by hand. In fact, hand washing is so ingrained that it’s actually a key part of a popular game show. The premise is that they offer you money or allow you to pick a prize. The prize may be larger than the cash offering or it might be a terrible prize like a t-shirt. The whole thing is sponsored by a laundry soap company so if you choose to take the prize, you hand wash a shirt to reveal your prize.
To hand wash clothes, you begin by soaking everything in hot water and the laundry soap. Of course this presumes you have hot running water in your home but that’s a different blog. We have hot water about 75% of the time so I plan laundry around those times. After about an hour soak, you start to wash the clothes by rubbing each piece of clothing between your knuckles to lather and scrub the clothes. Then, the soapy clothing is wrung out until all the excess water is gone and dunked into a bucket of clean water. The clothing is then wrung out again (over the bucket of soapy water lest you dirty your clean water) and hung to dry.
This is all very simple in theory but it’s actually a pretty tiring process since you’re kneeling on a wet floor, scrubbing and then wringing as hard as you can. Failing to wring out means it will take much longer to dry so you want to get it pretty well wrung out immediately.
After the first week, I knew it was one of things that I was not going to enjoy about Kenya though obviously it’s a minor inconvenience compared to the average women’s weekly washing here. Given that our single load of running clothes and underwear takes about 30-45 minutes, I can only imagine how long it takes to do a family’s laundry especially if you’re boiling water for each load.
It’s pretty hard on your clothes so I’m pretty sure we won’t be bringing much clothing home. I’ve also learned that the wicking and performance fabrics that we all love so much in the US are awful to hand-wash because they don’t lather well!
The upside is that it’s teaching M that wearing something for 5 minutes does not mean it’s dirty. I think the idea of “throwing a load in the wash” will never again be taken for granted in our house!
E - so industrious! It takes me back to when we had the same problem on the road - in Asia, our hosts always took care of the laundry, but in Europe we were often on our own.
ReplyDeleteEspecially in Poland it was a problem, since it was October and we were wearing jeans, and they are hopelessly difficult to wash in the sink and wring out - we always had clothes strung up in the bus to dry.
Finally Mike hit on the brilliant idea of buying a Russian washing machine (Poland had to buy from Russia at the time). We carried it on the bus with our equipment (they were small compared to an AMerican washer) and at night after the concert we would take turns with it, hooking it up to the sink in the room. A load took forever (like an hour or so), but it was like magic by that point - the entire team sat and watched the first load through the glass door (it was a front loader), exclaiming with joy when the dirty rinse water gushed out into the sink. At the end of the tour we gave the washer to our interpreter, who didn't have one; they were pricey for the average Pole. And Poland was a grimy country at the time; powered by coal, and with little in the way of air pollution control.
Keep those cultural anecdotes coming!
love you,
McMom
Wonderful posting, and in Belgium, we also bought a machine since the U.S. version of washing things so frequently made for larger loads than the typical European machine would hold. We take so much for granted, and I can definitely see where this would not be much fun. Essential and yet, oh so tedious!
ReplyDeleteXO, Mom/L