Things we take for granted...

The night I came home one of the first things I did was throw a load of dirty travel clothes into the washing machine. Normally this is a task taken for granted, but after my week on Tanna Island I was very aware of the privilege to be able to do this.

I think when you are a mother a washing machine is one of the things that you really need. A family of 6 produces lots of dirty clothes.
In the village, Michele has laundry every day, but with no electricity there is no machine.
So How Do They Do Laundry In Tanna?

Michele usually has one of the village women help her every morning.
They start with two large basins or buckets of cold water, soaking the dirty laundry.
Each piece is then scrubbed with a brush using bar soap. I have seen some of the women use a rock instead of a brush, and often they will beat the garment on a board. The goal is to get as much dirt out as possible, but the dirt never comes out completely

Next step is the rinse cycle. Here the washed laundry is soaked in the second basin of water getting the soap out.
The last step is wringing each piece getting out as much water as possible.
Laundry is then hung on the line, a fence, a tree, or whatever is available.

I don't mind doing laundry in the village, but the last step makes me crazy. Each piece needs to be flipped as many times as necessary until it gets dry.

The drying is totally dependant on the weather.

The South Pacific can be miserably hot, and when hot, laundry dries fast, but the South Pacific can have relentless rain and when it is raining, the laundry can hang for days. This is were the flipping comes in. Whenever there was a break in the rain I was flipping laundry.

because of the rain last week I left many wet shirts on the line.

The moldy stinky smell of clothes is taken for granted, but I was surprised when a towel that I had brought along invoked this reaction.

Michele passed the towel around and everyone smelled it and touched it.

"We love when you send these kinds of things," she said, "we always smell it and say how much it smells like Grandma's house."

That made me smile.