1/29/12

This morning we woke up to the smell of pancakes. The team that is here right now, a team of 7 or 8 men, brought a ton of pancake mix. After breakfast Cardon a beautiful and sweet tempered girl that is suspect is about 15 or 16 tapped on my shoulder and said something in creole I didn’t understand. Eventually I deciphered that she is planning to do laundry later. I had asked her to teach me and I suppose this was her offering an opportunity to learn. I went to my room to gather our dirty clothes and took the bag out back where I had been instructed to sit dirty laundry by the team leaders on past trips. She had already sat out two huge shiny aluminum bowls on the concrete near the outdoor shower. She went into the shower and filled a large bucket with water from the reservoir on the roof of the building. The shower is enclosed by a cinderblock wall with a drainage ravine jutting out in the ground to usher the water away from the house. Once I walked by while a couple of the little girls were showering. There were almost as many giggles coming from the shower as bubbles flowing down the ravine. She used the water from the shower to fill one of the silver bowls then separated the clothes into two piles: lights and darks. So far, I am with her. She piled the lights in the bowl of water.  Ronnie and I studied as she broke the foot long piece of almond colored soap into four smaller pieces. She picked up a white tee shirt and quickly brushed the soap back and forth on the fabric several times then. Her hands and fingers are both graceful and forceful with the fabric. She grabbed fists full of the garment and brushed them back and forth together. In a matter of seconds she had worked her way across the entire shirt scrubbing it clean. She wadded the shirt into an orderly handful with ease and wrung the soapy water out with one quick twist. Ronnie and I grabbed shirts and attempted to mimic her. I kind of got the hang of it by the time we had finished the pan but I could not master her grace and speed. We scrubbed the garments an additional time in Fab. I’m not sure why they needed a second washing but we followed her instructions per gesturing. The whites then went into a pan of bleach water. Then Cardon left us sitting in our little wooden chairs and went in to get something. We wondered if we should follow her but we know the word “vini” and she hadn’t said that. She came back with a small wadded up blue cloth. She opened it gently and there inside was a small blue square. I she spoke in creole about it. I reached out my hand and she gently gave it to me. I smelled it. It smelled nice. “I guess it is fabric softener” I told Ronnie.  But I have never seen a fabric softener tablet before. It was blue like the tablet you put in the back of a toilet bole to make the water blue. She took the small cloth and tablet back and tied the cloth in a knot. Then she filled one of the silver pans with fresh water and waved the cloth around in the water which turned blue. She wrung the bleach water out of the whites and placed them in the blue water. I had always wondered why my whites turned blue when we came to Haiti. Ronnie and I both looked at each other. “That’s why!” Ronnie nodded his head with a smile. We continued to assist with the scrubbing and wringing. Fedrina and some of the other ladies came out to see us washing our clothes. They all giggled and spoke about the ordeal in creole. I’m sure it was amusing. I deciphered that Fedrina was telling everyone we had used a machine to wash our clothes before. We finished and by this time some of the girls from Fedrina’s house had started washing their clothes next to us. Ronnie and I took our bucket of clean clothes to the line. We both looked around. “Where are the clothes pins?” I asked. Nobody understood my question. “I don’t think they use any.” Ronnie guessed. We just draped everything over the line and hoped for the best. Marilous came behind us and moved each item closer together and giggled. I really enjoyed the whole experience. I always wonder what it would have been like to live back then in the US. When everything was done by hand and everything was appreciated. The situation is not exactly like that here. They have a radio playing off of solar power in the background. But I enjoyed this. I hope Fedrina will teach me how to cook on open fire next!