Turkey Day Top Ten

8. I am grateful for a washer and dryer


This is what I get to use now. It's actually FUN to do laundry with these bad boys. Thanks Mom and Dad for making my entire life perfect by purchasing these...

I hope I don't ever take my laundry facilities for granted because I know so many people have it worse off. Here's a little peek at what things are like in Honduras:

Hermana Chambers is actually washing dishes, but this is the rock we used to wash our underwear on too.

Can you say shredded? I'm sure I had to fake that smile since I'd only been in the area a week and was still enduring major culture shock.

This one was a bit nicer...at least it didn't shred our clothing. Here's the deal: Get some water from the huge pila (a large cement container of water), put some in a smaller pila (the plastic one) and wet your clothes. Then scrub it up and down and all around with the bar of soap. Proceed to scrub your hands up and down the "washboard" with your clothing in tow. Ring out your clothing, rinse it several times and then hang it on the clothesline to dry. I think at least an hour or two of every "P day" was spent just doing laundry in my first area.

This one is pretty self-explanatory. This was also a bit counterproductive as there were usually Cows upstream peeing in the river. It was a catch 22...smell like sweat from stinky clothing or smell like dilluted cow urine? They chose the cow urine.

My mom has a picture of me sitting on a rock in the river washing laundry for a member to help her out. She had like 5 massive baskets of laundry to do. We hauled them out to the nearest river (with the baskets on our heads, of course) and washed clothes for several hours. In the picture you can actually SEE cows upstream from us.