Wash Day

I am thankful for all this laundry. It means my loved ones are at home.

Wash day starts with Kelsey or I sorting laundry in the hall. Brent and Austin usually gather the wash tubs and buckets for when Mama Ese arrives. Brent's favorite job is to carry her stool back to her! We also get her soap for her. She uses a powdered laundry detergent, a liquid antiseptic and a bar of key soap. She does the wash in our back hall way. It is close to the water and close to outside where she dumps her water after she is finished. She uses the two red buckets above to carry her water to the washtubs.

I have found these tubs to be very handy! They make perfect wash baskets and bathtubs!

The first one she scrubs everything and then wrings it out and puts it in the next tub. The next one everything gets another scrubbing.
 
The last tub is to rinse and then everything gets wrung out very hard. Occasionally I help with this step. But her hands are much stronger and faster than mine. It is amazing how the muscles in your fingers ache after you do that for awhile! It gets stacked in the buckets and then I take it out to hang on the wash line.

Just last week she asked for a wash board. I gave her the money and she went to market and came back with this plastic one. I had hunted high and low for them. Everyone I asked looked at me as if I was crazy. But she knew what she wanted and where to go. Kenny's jeans are hard to get clean and this makes her job so much easier! She showed me her fingernails the day she asked about a washboard. They are scrubbed down to the nubbins. Hopefully they grow out now!

I take it out to the line and quite a bit of it gets wrung out again. Especially the things in the bottom of the bucket can be dripping till I get to them again. It is amazing how much water a t shirt can hold. Jeans just get hung up dripping. There is no good way to get them wrung dry!
Most of the things are dry by 5:30 when it's starting to get dark. The jeans are done last because they are dirtiest and therefore they get hung out around noon. They often stay out overnight or I drape them over something inside to finish drying.

The dresses get hung on the side of the porch most days. It keeps them from baking in the hot African sun.

Brent almost always comes along to hang out wash. He hands me pins and clothes, but what he is really after is the empty bucket! He drags it in to Mama Ese. The reason he loves this is the attention he gets from her for doing it. Just recently he started wearing the bucket on his head to take it back in. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures.

The day I took pictures she was cooking lunch for us. She went to get that started and left her water sit. The boys decided to carry it out. Well, it was more like playing in it but they did get some hauled out! Austin will often carry some for her. It gets dumped in the concrete run off ditch around our house. Notice the ditch in the picture of Brent with the bucket. It runs all the way around our house and serves as a spouting.

And that is how our wash day goes! We do laundry Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Mama Ese usually comes about 8:30 and leaves around noon. Besides doing laundry she also mops my floors or makes us Ghanaian food. The picture above is her leaving. She walks about 15 to 20 minutes to our house. This day I had chicken bones I gave her and she perched them on her head to carry home.

I am so thankful for her! Her cheerfulness, hard work, and the love she gives my children are all day brighteners to me. She has had a hard life as a widow raising her children on her own. Her English is very limited so we have some interesting times communicating. My prayer is that we can lighten her load and that working at my house would be a joyful experience for her.