Reflections on Hand-Washing Laundry

After three months of doing my laundry by hand…I’ve come to realize a love-hate relationship with it. The pros are evident…when considering other options in Bolivia, it’s much cheaper than having someone else hand wash it for you and pay them for it (like my sitemate Pat does) or lugging it into the city to take it to a laundromat where you can *gasp* machine wash! I’d say that somewhere along the line I’m going to give in and choose one of those options for washing certain things like sweaters and sweatshirts and jeans, the things that are the biggest pains to wash because they retain so much water when you’re trying to rinse it out. Another merit of hand-washing is the superior effectiveness of spot cleaning compared to machine washing. I’ve found that in all my laundering experience that hand washing undergarments and clothes with stains is much more successful than merely throwing it into the machine for a cycle. There’s also a certain personal satisfaction that you get from hand-washing your clothes…you get a little exercise (I give myself my upper body workout by washing clothes) and you feel like you’re competent.

This being said…there are some clear disadvantages along with the time that it takes to hand-wash. Firstly is the major pain of things like jeans where they’re so hard to wring out and when you put them on the drying line you’re afraid they’re so water-logged and heavy that they’re just going to pull the whole line down. Secondly, for me is the location of where I wash the clothes…using plastic bins and buckets by my house…which also happens to be located in between the chickens and pigs and swarming with flies and wasps of some sort that buzz in my ear because there’s a nest in a tree somewhere close by. Then there is always your two majors fears of what is going to happen to your laundry in the process of washing…the worst things that can happen due to the amount of time that you’ve put into the act. There’s the fear that it’s going to rain while your laundry is out on the line and of course after it rains you just have to do your laundry again because in my belief rain water makes the clothes dirty again. And then there’s the worse one, that in transit from bucket to bucket or while the clothes are drying on the line a gust of wind will come and soon your newly washed clothes will be wet…and in the dirt…even dirtier than before you started washing them and you’ll have to wash them all over again. Of course this one can be remedied by using clothes pins on the line…but then again with the unpredictability of the weather…random gusts of wind can come and when you just assumed it was safe to hang your lightweight little seamless tank top from Gap on the line without a clothespin…*bam*…it’s in the dirt. And you’re washing it again tomorrow.