When you are living in a different country and a different culture everyday seems like a new adventure. Something as simple as doing laundry, finding a seat on the bus, or grocery shopping can become a bit more difficult, and most of the time fun! 
This post will take you step by step in how we do our laundry by hand in San Nicolas, Nicaragua. While we have taken tips and tricks from our host families and others in town, we have come up with our own intricacies and methods that seems to work for us.
Step 1: Gather your dirty laundry and other necessary supplies. We often use our speaker to listen to This American Life, Radio Lab, or other awesome podcast. Also pictured, sorted laundry, bar of laundry soap used for scrubbing and a bag of powdered detergent for soaking.
Step 2: Soak clothes in a bath of well mixed powdered laundry detergent and water for no more than 30 minutes. Any longer and the clothes will start to take on a stale water smell. We all know that smell! It’s always good to separate dirty socks from other clothes, because the if your socks are muddy your soaking water will turn brown pretty quick.
Step 3: Take clothes out of soaking water and place on the pila (concrete washboard/station). This is a clean pila all set for washing. There is a basin attached on the right that holds your clean/rinsing water.
Step 4: Begin scrubbing the clothes with bar of laundry soap (it smells awesome!)
Step 5: Be sure to get lots of suds and use TONS of water to rinse out the suds. Kyle is going with the unconventional method of doing a pile of clothes at once. It works for us!
Step 6: Place clothes pins on current clothes you are wearing so you are all set to start hanging you clothes up outside.
Step 7: Hang clothes in the sunniest/windiest spot possible.
Step 8: Wait for clothes to dry. Sometimes 1 day, sometimes 1 week.
Step 9: When you hear it raining on your tin roof, run outside quickly to grab your clothes and hang on the clothes line in the kitchen.
We usually do our laundry over the weekend. The whole process takes about 1 hour if we have a normal week of laundry. It really isn’t so bad. And we actually find ourselves looking forward to the time to zone out a bit and catch up on podcasts. I am sure our methods will evolve and change over our time here, but we think we have a pretty good start in our laundry-doing abilities.
Have you every done your laundry by hand? What tips do you have for us?
This is going to sound weird but what kind of laundry detergent is used there? We were just on Little Corn Island and asked the hotel what laundry soap is used because the sheets always smell very nice like lemongrass or herbal and she told us only that it's nothing fancy just the standard Nicaraguan laundry detergent, like their version of tide. Do you know what this soap could be? Thanks!!
ReplyDeleteMarfil (elephant brand) is what seems to be most common used around here. When you do laundry by hand it is with a "bar" of soap. So that's what we have used. There are SO many options in the stores and pulperias here so you can basically get any scent you dream of...so that doesn't narrow it down much.
DeleteI am not sure what people would us as a detergent to put into a laundry machine if that's what they were doing on Little Corn Island. Hope that helps!
its really awesome...eco-friendly...i am from India where i have splendid amount of water and space....and a smart washing machine ....i was doing a research on laundry unit to set up in my new villa,....this is a great work...,with slight modification. this area can be tiled and roofed with open side walls...will send you an image for sure
ReplyDeletethanks a million for sharing this...
ReplyDelete