It's been almost two weeks since I left the US, and I was in dire need of shirts (remember, if you will, that we weren't showering for the first few days). Our boss had told us that we could pay the office guard's wife, who also cleans the office, to do our laundry.
Laundry is hand-washed outdoors here in big plastic tubs, and hung to dry on clotheslines, railings, fences, walls - even bushes or on the ground! I knew coming here that my clothes might not fare well with this treatment of hand-scrubbing and sun-bleaching, so I purposely only brought free Princeton T-shirts and cheap (and sometimes rather ugly) items I bought at Target (new jeans, bras, and underwear) with the thought that I could leave them all behind and fill my suitcase with souvenirs when I returned to the US in August.
This morning I passed off my bulging plastic bag of clothes to the guard to give to his wife, and waited to see what would happen.
Later in the afternoon, I stopped by the office to use the internet. I looked up only to find all of my clothes hanging out the office's second-floor windows! [see picture, click for larger view]
Nevertheless, all my clothes were returned to me, most of them dry (the socks and jeans were still a little wet), but everything was clean and fresh, and even the stains were gone!
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