Throughout my two years living in Guatemala I remained fascinated with the many places that people dried their clothes. I mean they were left to dry EVERYWHERE. From what I knew, there was not a single washing machine and certainly no dryers in my village. In fact the closest laundromat I knew of was located in the city of Xela (about an hours bus ride from my house). This is where I took my clothes to be cleaned for fear that I would have fleas for two whole years. People can get fleas too - I did! Many people in my town however, did not have this luxury and washed their clothes in the river that ran through the center of the town. Every single day there were women sitting down by the river scrubbing clothes on the rocks.
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| This picture was not in my town (far too tropical), but I thought it was pretty |
Clothes weren't the only things that were washed in the river. After my host family slaughtered a pig for Christmas, some of the women went down to the river (a few feet away from the house) to wash the intestines. I;m not sure what they had planned for them once they were "cleaned," but I didn't stick around to find out.
You can see why the development of the electric washing machine and its widespread adoption starting in the late 1940s and, later the dryer, helped create the conditions that allowed women who, as in Guatemala today, were usually responsible for this household chore to work outside the house. It freed up time to do other things.
ReplyDeleteI'll go out on a limb here and assume that there is no EPA in Guatemala regulating the pollution effects of all that washing of clothes and intestines in the river. (I hope the intestine washers were downstream from the clothes washers that day.)
I am pleased to say that I have a clothesline and I use it. But I use the dryer a lot more than the clothes line. Excuse me while I go throw in a load of laundry.
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