The Enemy

Tell the army to stand down: I have discovered the enemy, and it is not terrorism. It is not even fear. It is laundry.

Some Volunteers have developed a very zen attitutde towards laundry since their arrival in Cambodia, preferring to let it flow into the rhythms of their days and enjoying the quiet monotony of scrubbing and rinsing. I have resisted this calmness and continue to regard my laundry heap, when I cannot avoid looking at it, with an attitude of suspicion and dread. Perhaps this is due to my overwhelming incompetence at the task. Either I use too much soap and am unable to rinse it out properly, in which case my clothes dry crustily on the line. Or else I dry the clothes on the dirty part of the bamboo pole (as opposed to the elusive clean part of the bamboo pole), leaving streaks of dirt along the backs (although I have discovered that hangers do a great deal to alleviate this problem). Or else I wash on a day when it rains unpredictably, in which case nothing dries and everything (especially jeans) acquires a faint mildewy smell.

The process of doing laundry is nearly as old as the existence of cloth itself here. You fill your tub with soap (how much? I am never sure), clean-ish water, and your clothes. You crouch over the tub and scrub the armpits, collar, and hems of everything with a handheld brush until you are sure, sure, that they must be clean by now, right? After 5 minutes of vigorous scrubbing? And yet....is that brown sweat-and-dust spot on the back of the collar still there? Augh! Maybe no one will see it.... You give up and dump out the wash-water and vigorously rinse the clothes (twice) in fresh-ish water, and then you hang everything out to dry, like so, and hope uselessly that it won't rain that afternoon.



And I think it is safe to say that even those Volunteers who enjoy doing laundry still loathe washing towels. Towels are designed to be absorbent; but that means that they absorb every speck of dust and every grain of detergent in the wash-water. I am never sure which one wins out. Some people have stopped washing towels altogether, but I carry on, hoping, someday, to use such a large overabundance of soap as to overwhelm the other muck and come up with a gleaming white towel. I'll let you know how that goes....