The Neverending Story of Laundry

So today was both absurd and completely normal, as are most days here (as is life? says Camus).

So the first absurd part of today was the holiday. It's El Oro Day! What is El Oro? El Oro is the province I live in. So, El Oro day is just a day off from work and school to celebrate the fact that we live in this southern coastal province. Are there parades on El Oro day? Are there fiestas? Nope. It's just a day off of school. A week after school started back up again, we have our first of many holidays. So, here's to El Oro day.
I woke up at 8, which for me is a very early time to be conscious and moving, but is kind of late for Zarumeno standards. They have a saying here: Quien le madruga, Dios le ayuda. This means that people who wake up early are blessed by God for their early rising prowress. Yep, still trying to master the whole "morning person" routine. Many of my friends have slowly become morning people here.

One reason why I think so many women wake up early is to do the laundry. Doing the laundry in the US is so simple. You take a giant batch of clothes, put it in the laundry machine, pick whether you want hot or cold or warm water, pick whether you want a bleach cycle, pick if the clothes are "Normal" or "Delicate" or whatever, and then in 40 minutes, you have dry clothes. After throwing the clothes in the dryer for an hour, you're done. Poof! Clean, good smelling clothes.


Here, I dread my laundry days. My host mom knows this and, like an old lady, constantly chastises me to my laundry more often, which just bugs me. The whole process of laundry bugs me because of its tediousness but I'm trying to get more patient.

This is how we wash laundry in Zaruma.


1. I thoroughly scrub my kitchen sink so make sure there is no pasta or tomato sauce or any other vestiges of my Italian food obsession in the sink. Tada! The sink is now Laundry Central.

2. I touch the soap bar, which has to, like Madonna's ego, be handled very carefully, or it becomes the Bar of Pain. It's full of very concentrated detergent, and holding it for too long makes my hands get angry and painful and itchy.

3. I lay out each piece of clothing, soak it, then use my laundry brush and the Soap Bar of Death to scrub both sides of the cloth. Then I rinse it with the brush, turning it over, and bunch the cloth together to make sure all the soap is out of it. I scunch it up to get all of the water out and drop it in the "clean clothes bucket."

4. I repeat this for an hour, more or less, until all the clothing is washed.

Here's the fun part:

5. Then, I go outside to the clothes line to hang everything up. Hopefully, it's a hot, sunny day. This means the clothes will dry in an hour or two. If it's cloudy, they can take all day. Or, if it's the rainy season, where it rains all day, day after day after day in raindom, it can take four or five days for a single shirt to dry.

To spice things up, some days, like today, a clothing line will topple to the floor, and all of my hard washed clothes will be covered in dust and dirt, leaving me to repeat the process over, and over, and over again.



So there you have it. The saga of laundry in Zaruma. It's the never ending story, and one reason women here are always on their feet. I can only imagine how long it takes a mother of four to do laundry. How many hours every week she must spend washing, kneading, and hanging clothes. She must spend one third of her life doing laundry. One thing is for certain: i will never again take for granted the miracle of the washing machine, and the life of convenience we have in the States.


Hasta pronto!