Thoughts over Morning Laundry

Washing laundry in a blue bucket in the bathroom.

I remember Timanet and Bibi who taught me to wash laundry in Haiti. All of us laughing as I tried to make the squelching soapy sound with my hands and my clothes in the water like they did every time clothes hit clothes.

Squelch. Squelch. Squelch.

I maybe succeeded a couple of times in the three years that I lived there. Maybe.

Now, here I am again in my bathroom on the other side of the world with a bucket of laundry and some soap. This time, more than six years later, my bucket is tall and deep instead of wide and low. This time I sit on a low stool in a tile bathroom instead of on a cinder block under a tree.

Last week my laundry came out smelling more dirty than clean. Such is life.

Here there are banana trees, mango trees, coconuts, rice almost every day. It feels familiar to me. New but familiar. More familiar than dinner in a big city that costs more than $20 per person. Here I can eat for $2 or less. A simple life. And yet life is never simple.



I hang my laundry up on the line outside and it is dripping water on the ground. My arms were tired and I couldn't wring it out enough. But it will still dry in the heat here so I leave it.

When I come back later, ants will be crawling on some of my shirts and a couple will bite my legs. But at least that will be better than them being in our food again.

I will shake them off and go inside. Learning to be at home in this new place.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Does it Mean to Give?

There’s something I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around lately.   I live in a country where people don’t have a lot of material possessions. They also don’t have a lot of food, and the food that they do have is not the most nutritious or balanced type of diet. Their houses are not great; they don’t have cars; many don’t have jobs. The question: What is my response? Many times, people here ask me for things. It seems that I can’t leave our mission base without someone asking me for my water bottle, my sweater, my shoes, some money. I’m pretty sure they see me as a rich white person. What I’ve realized recently is that in many ways, this is actually true. If you look at the big picture of the whole world and all of the people in it, I am rich, even though I am a missionary and I have to ask for money for everything that I have. I am rich, even though I buy almost all of my clothes on sale, and have many that were given to me. I am rich, even though my laptop is five years o
Read more

From Naivete to Growth

Image
I remember sitting caffeinated, late at night, in the library with a friend in college, talking about foreign mission. One day, we could live in Africa, we said over our lattes and laptops. It seemed a glorious thing to me, this missionary life in a foreign country. At the time, I wanted to travel. I did have a true and real desire to love and live among the poor, but the rest of it was a dream, built on nothing – I had barely left the country then. In fact, I don’t think I had ever met a real live missionary. I had heard about mission trips, but never been on a foreign one. My imaginary life was just that, imaginary. A little more than a few years later, I was moving to Haiti to start a mission there with a few other people from an organization that I loved. I don’t think I could have admitted it then, but it definitely felt glorious. I had read a few books about missionaries, met some missionaries, been on mission trips, been inspired by the passion, zeal, and sacrifice of others
Read more

Under the Shade of the Almond Tree

The air is fresh and clean up here.  Can you hear that? The sound of silence. The breeze moving through the trees. No traffic, no big trucks or motorcycles. Peace and stillness. Sitting outside under the shade of an almond tree. She has AIDS, we are told. She is frail, we can see. A man disappears to get us food from the garden. Bananas, sugar cane. A gift for our visit. A gift for the priest. We sit on chairs. She sits on the floor, in the doorway. The air is fresh and clean up here.  The silent mountain where death is coming but has not yet taken the one we came to see. So we sing and we pray and we talk under the shade of the almond tree, up in the clear, cool mountain air. The place that feels like Heaven, though Heaven is not yet here. Months later, we hear news of her death.
Read more