For many months now, a lovely woman named Hope has done our laundry whenever we leave a bag out on the porch with a few thousand shillings tucked inside. A few days later, the bag will return with all the clothes neatly folded and cleaner than they've ever been.
Well, we had just given Hope a big bag of our dirty clothes when I realized that literally every other garment I owned was coated in a brown-ish sheen of dirt accumulated over many months. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to teach myself the art of hand laundry.
In total, 14 shirts and pants got soaked in a bucket of hot, soapy water, vigorously rubbed around (my hands still bear the scabs that are testament to the skin-chaffing intensity of this process) and then rinsed in another bucket, and hung out to dry.
Of course, I choose to embark on this experiment at the beginning of a stretch of three rainy days. Nothing like a few extra rinse cycles, I always say. It took up most of the morning and there was more than a little bird poop to scrub away when the drying was over, but I'm darned proud of the clean shirts and pants that now hang on my wall.
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