At the orphanage, Saturday is “wash day”, with all the girls sharing the work. This process takes a long time, but the effort put into immaculate whites is characteristic of Haitian culture. They take appearances, especially for school and church, very seriously. It’s a point of pride. How can a country of dust possess immaculate whites? The secret is…lots of work.
First, you fill three buckets with water. Sometimes you have to draw the water and carry it up the mountain. Sometimes you don’t have three buckets and you have to go through a complicated water juggling process. A lot of Haitians bring their clothes TO the water, usually the nearest river. If you have basins, you put the soap in one, “fab” (powdered soap) in another, and reserve the last one for rinsing. You buy “savon”, that is, soap at the market in long sticks that make me think of candles. The hard part is making it into a ball. After you have worked it into a ball, using water and your laundry to help, you have the soap ball you will use for the first pass.
Step two is called “fote”, a word here which means “scrub as if you were trying to put holes in your clothes by force of friction”. You use the soap ball first, covering your clothes with soap and then fote again, scrubbing one section of the garment against another. This process takes a long time, because the goal is to restore brown clothing to its original state of spotlessness. If you are washing in the river, you still use a soap ball, but you can’t do step three “fote ak fab”, so you repeat step two.
Step four is rinsing. Ideally, you rinse the used, abused and soap-saturated clothing in water three times, but when water is scarce, (or when you’re a lazy American), you can rinse it once, at the risk of having clothing hard with soap when it’s dry.
Step five is to wring it out, removing as much water as possible. The seams in my clothes and my poor socks are all stretched out and torn apart by the strain of the wringing. This explains why undergarments live brief lives in Haiti. It may also have something to do with the use of barbed wire as a drying rack. I have seen clothing laid out to dry on bushes, fences, rocks, lines, and barbed wire. Hopefully, the sun is out to dry things toutswit, but, if not, it’ll take days to dry.
Step six is called “get rid of the wrinkles you put in by wringing”. To iron clothes is to “pase rad”. Unfortunately, ironing is easier said than done. The electric iron, with which we are familiar, is useless. The second variety is heated by coal and looks kind of like a metal safe for a pie slice. You put the burning coal into the iron and somehow your clothes aren’t stained by soot. The third type, which was graciously donated out of Mr. Lou’s collection, is placed on the gas stove to heat. The Haitians are big on ironing; Bob swears that they starch and iron his underwear.
In conclusion, this lengthy process gets really old really fast, as you can imagine, especially when you have a whole week’s worth of sweaty clothes. But five months of this experience was extremely good for me. I appreciate my washer and dryer so very, very much more.
Final tally:
Haiti – 1.5 hours labor + 6 hours wait
U.S. – 0.083 hours labor + 2 hours wait I need lots of help