Laundry

“But the Christmas vacation was very far away: but one time it would come because the earth moved round the sun always.”

I’ve begun to read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce and this line struck a particular chord with me.

As of when I am writing this, the 13^th of September, it has been a month to the day since I arrived in Guyana. I can’t exactly say that time has flown, but it is hard for me to believe I’ve made it this far. The days here are very long; the sun rises early. I usually wake up at sunup, 6 AM, and must look for ways to fill my time until I can go to bed again. As a result, I have begun to take pleasure in performing what used to be time-consuming, mundane household tasks: cooking, cleaning the kitchen, sweeping the living room, etc. With my formerly busy schedule, I used to think of these responsibilities as a burden. Now, I am thankful for them.

Today I spent the afternoon doing laundry. Around here, not many people have washing machines, so they do their laundry in tubs in their yard. This is exactly how I do mine. Sitting on an overturned bucket by the spigot in my front yard, I scrub my laundry on a washboard, rinse it, wring it, and then hang it on the line. Because of the water shortage in Berbice, we only have running water at designated times during the day. I must race to get my laundry rinsed before the water is turned off again. As happens from time to time, long strips of ash from the leaves burned off the sugarcane floated over from the fields and came down like black snow as I worked. They landed in the washtub and clung to clothes on the line. By the time I finished today, I could barely lift my arms, but I enjoy being absorbed in the quiet comfort of manual labor.

As I washed clothes today, I reflected on what Caroline, Moses, and I did last night. We were supposed to meet a Peace Corps volunteer and her friends at a bar called Sher’s. The volunteer did not show up, but I did meet a few other people and learned a bit more about the local culture. In Trench Town Rock, Bob Marley croons, “One good thing about music is when it hits you, you feel no pain.” This is not the case in Guyanese bars—the music is played so loudly, it makes your ears ring and changes the rhythm of your heartbeat. I did not enjoy the bar atmosphere, but it was good for me to get out of the house. As much as I enjoy being domestic, I need to start making the rest of this town my home. It’s hard, but I need to remind myself that I’m going to be here a long time.
These are a couple of pictures of my shower. We deal with the water shortage by always keeping a few buckets filled and we deal with the constantly leaking shower by using the drips to fill the bucket. Pretty clever, eh?