Knock on wood

November 16, 2014

Natasha has a miracle:  a washing machine that washes a full basket of dirty laundry in less than 2 hours.  They bought it two-plus years ago when they first moved here and it faithfully churns through laundry from our two households almost daily.  True, it needs four buckets of water, drawn and hauled from the large plastic tank behind the house, two to begin the load, two just before the final rinse.  Accordingly, four buckets of water drain away from our hard-working friend as well.  These buckets we collect and throw onto the grassy areas around the house.  The drainwater often overflows, however, and some part of the water inevitably floods the tile porch floor or the ground beside the house—these places tend to be perpetually wet.  (My suspicion is that if we continue to run the washer and spill over as we do, in time the whole area will become marshy and the building will list into the bog….)

The magical machine--note the blue bucket Raina has thrown off the porch 

Once the laundry is done, we hang it out in the African sun to dry.  This may take only a couple of hours in the hot sunlight or a couple of days if we have rain.  If you get a load up just before nightfall (when all hanging out laundry must cease due to the lack of light and the abundance of nighttime creatures that might find the laundress tasty—or at least a threat), it may dry overnight.  But you must wait a couple of hours after daylight before bringing it in to ensure that any creature who has decided to lay eggs on your clothing has been baked away.  (Natasha tells the rather gruesome story of the little worm that lived just under her skin, presumably because she brought the laundry in too early and wore it.)

The tank of water and the laundry lines--empty today--behind them

We laundresses have a mortal enemy: light off (the local euphemism for a power outage).  Once the power is off, wherever you are in the process must stop—sometimes for hours.  A common situation is a load done in the evening, but stopped at the rinsing stage because it is too dark for the lazy (or nervous, or busy or forgetful) laundress to fetch the water for the final rinse.  “I’ll do it tomorrow morning, before we go to school” she tells herself.  But then, the day dawns without power.  The batch cannot be finished and must sit in the hot washer until power is restored and someone can rescue it. 

Morning on campus--my favorite time of day

Because I work four days a week from 6:30 a.m. until 5:00 p.m., keeping up with the wash requires an evening load almost every night, and a quick hanging-out episode before we drive away the following morning.  On the weekend I catch up any leftovers and do the sheets. (An intern complained about itchiness and skin irritation on his upper body.  We realized that he hadn’t been washing his sheets regularly, and his bed was probably inhabited by insects attacking him through the night.  His mattress was baked in the hot sun and the sheets summarily laundered.  Consequences of unwashed bedding can be unpleasant….)

A few weeks ago a glorious thing happened.  I was all caught up with the laundry by Saturday morning.  “What can go wrong?” I jauntily boasted.  As a quick afterthought, I laughed, “Knock on wood.”

That Sunday night I found out I had head lice.  Everything in the house that my head had touched now needed to be washed: my clothes, all my bedding and pillows. The mattress should be sprayed with salt water, the couch too.  All my hairpins, combs and clips needed to be abandoned or treated to salt water (which promptly rusted them.)  Luckily we had a lice comb and shampoo.  Not so luckily, the lice didn’t succumb easily.  Two weeks later I was still doing treatments every few days and hanging out my all my bedding to bake away the vermin.

Then it happened:  the washer broke.  A few days of wet beds and dealing with lice found us baskets deep in laundry from each house.  What to do?  Repairmen, if you even find one, are unlikely—willing to take your money and leave the job undone.  So we started washing by hand:  soak clothing for an hour in soapy wash water, scrub with the heels of your hands, rinse, wring, hang.  A couple of loads into the process made us wonder if we should follow Ghanaian practice and hire a laundress.  I hadn’t knocked on wood fast enough.

Then Prince Charming came to our rescue—my good husband decided to explore the situation.  After a half hour of delving he mended the electrical cord, found a blockage, removed it, and started a successful test run.  We were back in business!  Hours of faithful churning later (incredibly, no light off!!) found our laundry on the line and our baskets empty.

Today my lice is gone, nearly all have recovered from their illnesses (except Emmanuel who is battling Malaria today), and I have only one small partially-filled basket of laundry in the house. I’m in good washerwoman shape.  But I’m not boasting.  I know too well how things can change.

Knock on wood.