Washing Clothes

Happy belated new year everyone! I’ve been feeling under the weather for the last few days and so not much has happened since going to the ghetto on Monday. Tuesday the girls and I stayed up until 11:45 and Cliff picked the girls up to take them to the top of the hill we live on which has a spectacular view of the whole city to see all the fireworks. I watched the fireworks from the back patio for a few minutes before crashing. Cliff picked the girls up around 3 yesterday and took them to a resort on lake Victoria so they could swim, play soccer and hang out, I had a whomping migraine and stayed in the quiet house resting, which did me a lot of good because I’m feeling much better today. 

The weather has been cold and rainy for the last three days (part of the reason I’ve been feeling crappy I think) and I put off doing laundry until this morning, I’m down to a pair shorts (which I can’t wear out of the compound), a skirt, and a tank top. So I got up this morning and decided to wash clothes right after my shower. I go to turn on the light in the bathroom…...nothing. The power is out -.- which means I have to either wait until tomorrow to use the washing machine, which would mean I wouldn’t have clean clothes until Friday night and would have to recycle something in the dirty pile for Friday and possibly Saturday if the rain keeps up, or I could wash the massive load of clothes by hand and have clean clothes tomorrow. If you know me at all, I cringe and shudder at the idea of recycling dirty cloth and only do it if absolutely necessary. So I hauled pretty much my entire wardrobe to the court yard and dumped them on the floor. Prosey senior was washing the girls clothes and was glad to have some company, Calvin came skipping over to me as I squatted in front of my tub of water, armed with a hunk of soap. He smile and immediately squatted on the other side of the tub and started moving the dirty clothes into the tub to be washed. He chatted causally as we washed my clothes, it was a little unsettling to have a four year old washing my underwear, but he didn’t seem to care. During the first wash (we washed everything twice and rinsed it thrice) he narrowed his eyes as I scrubbed a pair of bermuda shorts and spoke sharply to me, his mother laughed and wiped soap from her forehead. “What did he say?” I asked. She laughed some more as she leaned over her tub of clothes, “he said you don’t wash clothes the right way.” I laughed with her and looked at Calvin’s hands. I was washing the material against the knuckles of my free hand, he was washing the material against its self (as Grace did when she helped me with my laundry during my first week). I nudged him and adjusted my technique to suit him, he smiled and gave me an approving nod and let me continue to wash my clothes. He got a little over excited with the bar of soap which is why we had to rinse everything three times and then hung them up to dry. I wasn’t the only one to wait until the last minute to wash clothes, the girls also had an impressive load and the clothes line which is 15 yards long with 5 lines of wire is pretty much full of drip drying clothes. Let me tell you, my hands, wrists and forearms are SO sore from wringing everything out, if you need to work out your forearms, do your laundry in the tub for a month or two. Yeesh. 

Today is going to be a busy day, I’m putting together an itinerary for the boys, Grace is going to help with the bible study in the mornings, Filda and Prosey are going to help with the baking after lunch, Cliff and I will take the boys to the soccer field down the street, I’ll be doing the sewing project with them, both by hand and with machine, a creative writing assignment or two and camp games/songs in the evening before bed. I’ll post the schedule when I’m finished with it, I’m getting really really excited to have all the kids here for a few days. I also have to figure out how to work the sewing machines as I’ve never used a peddle powered one before. Should be fun!