How to: Hand-wash your Clothes, Nicaraguan Style

Every few days, we join thousands of Nicaraguans and women all over the developing world in the painstaking process of washing our clothes by hand. I once heard someone claim that the invention of the washing machine single-handedly liberated women to work outside the home, and I believe it. Especially if you have a flock of 10 or so children like so many women here traditionally do, washing clothes for the whole family takes a looooooong time. Add to the daily chores of making tortillas, cleaning the floor, and taking care of little kids (jobs that men are constitutionally incapable of performing) four hours every day or two of scrubbing the daily dirt from your kids' clothes, and there aren't many more hours left in the day.

Unfortunately, the washing machine hasn't made it to rural Nicaragua yet, so women still wake up at ungodly hours (4 or 5 a.m. usually) to accomplish everything they're obliged to accomplish in a day. We're only two people, so Davie and I do the laundry once a week, alternating who does it each week. We try to wear our clothes as long as we can before washing them, but even so, a load of laundry takes us an intensive 3ish hours to wash by hand. Most Nicaraguan women wash clothes twice a week or so, waking up before the sun is up to do laundry so that the clothes have all day to dry in the sun.

I don't even scrub my clothes as hard as most Nicaraguan women do, but after every load of laundry I feel completely exhausted, like I've been in a 3-hour tug-of-war contest. My hands feel tingly and raw for the next day or so, and my arm muscles ache. I suppose this explains why even older Nicaraguan women are still amazingly strong. This intense scrubbing also takes a decided toll on the clothes; most of Davie's t-shirts have baseball-sized holes in the armpits, and all the jeans I brought to Nicaragua a little over a year ago have fallen apart already.

The only break women get in all this is when it comes to underwear. The aura of privacy surrounding a person's underclothes forces men and children to wash their own damn undies – a task that they do in the shower. Everything else – clothes, sheets, towels, rags – the women wash. We get especially nostalgic about washing machines when we have to wash either jeans (which are really hard to wring out) or sheets (which are just way too hefty for the area of the pila, or washing sink).

We just wash our clothes in the pila in our back yard, next to the grove of banana trees, but we've seen all manner of laundry-doing landscapes. Women in the country often wash their clothes in a river or stream near their house or lug all of their dirty clothes to their water source, which could be a natural spring or a well half a mile or so from their house. When we were on the Isla de Ometepe, we discovered a pila strategically placed waste-deep in the Lago Nicaragua, where women could do their laundry with the best views of the lake and surrounding volcanoes.

In Spanish, the word for “washing machine” and “person who does the laundry” is the same: lavadora. The only person we know of in San Nicolas who has an actual machine, however, is Idalia, our school principal. But even Idalia hardly ever uses her washing machine; she claims that the machine just doesn't clean clothes as thoroughly as a good hand washing. We're skeptical. But in case you want to test out Idalia's theory, join us and many many Nicaraguan women in washing your clothes by hand this week! Here's how.

What You Need:

2 large buckets

A pila, or a ribbed surface. If you don't have anything like this, you can use a piece of rough cement or rock.

Enough water to fill both buckets 2/3 of the way

Laundry detergent – the powder kind

Laundry soap – a solid bar of soap

A piece of string to hang up as a clothesline

Clothespins

Dirty clothes

How to Wash Your Clothes by Hand, Nicaraguan Style:

1. Fill both buckets with water, dumping a half-cup of powdered detergent into the wash bucket and reserving the other bucket for rinsing.
2. Dump all of your dirty clothes into the wash bucket and soak them for at least 30 minutes in the soapy water. In the mean time, clean off your pila or washing area; it is possible for clothes to become more dirty in the process of cleaning them if you don't do this.
3. After the clothes have soaked for a while, you can start washing. Take one item of clothes from the wash bucket. Wring it out a little, but leave enough water in it for it to get a little sudsy. Rub the soap bar on it, particularly on parts that are stained or especially stinky, like the armpits or collar. Soaped side down, scrub the cloth across the ribbed or rough pila thoroughly. (Nicaraguan women get especially ferocious with the cloth at this point). When you've done this to all the important parts (sometimes front and back is necessary), wring it out thoroughly to try to get all the soap out. Then drop it in the rinse bucket.
4. Repeat step 3 with all of the clothes in the wash bucket. I usually save underwear and socks for last so they get a good full soak.
5. Once you've washed all the clothes, you still need to wring them out. This part is deceptively important – if you don't wring your clothes out really well, they will take too long to dry and will start smelling like old wet washcloths. It's all in the wrists.
6. When all of the clothes are wrung dry, hang them up on the the clothesline; barbed wire is a popular clothesline around here. Try to hang them so that the clothes overlap as little as possible so they'll dry quickly. We're in the dry season now, so the wind usually dries clothes within a few hours, but in the rainy season it sometimes took three days to dry a pair of jeans.
   When all is said and done, your clothes won't have the nice soft, warm feeling of clothes emerging from a dryer, but you will be able to brag that they were all washed with no other power than your own.