What time is it? It’s laundry day!

So we have a very nice stackable Kenmore washer and dryer unit. Both of them have glass doors so you can see the clothes spinning and the neighbor kids like to watch it for hours on end.

I may have embellished a little bit. We actually haul our laundry up to the roof of our building where we have a large sink all of our own. We wash and rinse our clothes by hand and then we hang them on the line to dry. Neither of us is very experienced at doing laundry by hand, in fact we had never done it before coming to Kenya. We have, however, developed a pretty good system and it goes pretty fast. (About an hour to wash and hang one load. Then we wait several hours for the clothes to dry before we can put them away.) We always worry that we’re not getting them quite clean enough or that we’re not getting all of the soap out but we’re sure we use WAY more water for our laundry than our neighbors.

We always have to wash the sink before we can wash our clothes.

The dry cycle takes 3 hours for button-up shirts, 5 hours for t-shirts, 8 hours for pants!

After washing our clothes by hand for five weeks we have determined this. Now we have actually DONE laundry. All you washing machine people have never actually DONE laundry. You have loaded a machine that does it for you, but this is the real deal. (Any readers who have done laundry by hand may now pat themselves on the back) Don’t misunderstand; we don’t have anything against washing machines. In fact, we’re very much looking forward to enjoying that luxury upon our return home. We just think it’s a funny phrase we use when we don’t, in a way, actually DO the laundry.

Our laundry room... dirty clothes on the sheet in the bed frame, clean clothes in the suitcases and not-quite-dry clothes hanging on the line.