An Open Letter to the Women Who are Doing the Washing
Photo by pilesasmiles
I see you, walking to bore holes, or wells. You carry aid buckets full of soap and water purifier. You are re-building your homes, or hanging up mosquito nets around your children.
You are in the river, thinking about a million other things. Your skirts are hitched up to around your knees. Your bottom is planted on a rock, or you are bent over, and you are scrubbing. I see you on the swollen riverbank, or kneeling on the banks of an estuary, or gathered around a well.
Later that night, I excuse myself a little early from dinner to do my laundry by hand, too. I fill the sink or tub with water and dump the clothes in. I sprinkle the laundry powder in, dusting my laundry, almost, as I might sugar a Bundt cake out of the oven; or you might salt the nsima, or the plantains, or the laing, in your pot. I start swishing, back and forth. The water goes from clear to muddy brown, sluicing away the dust and dirt of a place recovering from natural disaster.
I rinse. The water won’t ever be totally clean, if it even started that way. Your river water, constantly moving, might be more satisfying.
I dry my laundry by hanging it across the towel bars or doors or from an elastic clothing line. For years, I used detergent that I picked up on some travels to Malawi (OMO Hand Wash Powder. Provides 14 days of freshness!). Now, though, I’m using a brand new to me. It doesn’t lather as well.
I want to ask you what you think of it.
You dry your laundry using string you found someplace, pulling it out from a pile of flood debris, unraveling it from around some rebar, maybe. You jerry-rig some sticks; plant them in the dirt just outside what used to be your home. Or you drape your laundry onto the makeshift shelter that is your home now. Scraps of galvanized tin, your new roof, bake in the sun, after all; things dry much faster set atop galvanized.
My colleagues want to know why I don’t have the hotel staff do my laundry, if the service is available. They say it’s a good way to contribute to the local economy. They say we have many tasks.
They aren’t wrong, and in another story, one of you would be the one to do my laundry, and aid from the agency I volunteer for might be used in your home, and this might be one of those tales in which you recognize me wearing the clothing you washed over the weekend. You flag me down, or maybe I recognize you from the morning delivery—such things have happened.
But in this story, you women in the river—you live a few miles away from where we are, and I have learned that even these few miles detract from your day, from your time with your children, from your work. It will not be you who washes my clothes.
I do my laundry in my hotel sink now even when I vacation with family or friends. As I do out on deployment, I excuse myself a little early, do my laundry, clog our bathroom with my underwear, socks, shirts.
I think of you while I’m doing this: you, whose home has been washed away in a flood, and whose blankets have become choked with mud; you, who lived through an earthquake that buried your belongings in chips of hollowblock concrete; you, who watched the river you trusted and lived by rise, and rise, until it brought silt over your threshold, into your church clothes and your baby’s blankets.
You must do your laundry.
You look for scraps of soap, and you walk down to the river or the nearest bore hole or well. You sit with the other members of your community, and you scrub. You wash and you talk. At the end, you have met with your friends and neighbors; you have finished a necessary chore; you are, we hope, getting back to normal.
I do my laundry in the sink, or the plastic tub, that you do not have. I hang it on the elastic line you do not have. I buy the individual packets of laundry powder, and the same bars of laundry soap you might, just to get as close as I can to you, but we are ever the more distant from each other.
Yi Shun Lai is the Features Editor at Undomesticated, the author of Not a Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty Wu and Pin Ups. She is also a ShelterBox Response Team Volunteer.