It's been a year since we've done our laundry. In Arequipa, our host family's housekeeper did it. Here, we've been paying someone $10/week to wash it by hand, dry it, and iron it.

When our vet told us recently that he was selling his 2-yr-old washing machine, we realized it would be cheaper to buy it than continue paying $10/week for 18 more months. At first we were a little conflicted, because our laundry provides a job for our neighbor. We put a lot of thought and prayer into this and for a number of reasons, decided to do it.

I couldn't be more pleased. Maybe it's the sense of control over my own clothes again. Maybe it's the fact that a shirt can go from clean to dirty in one day (instead of 1-3 weeks). Regardless, I am so far not the least bit bothered by the tasks involved. And there are several.

1. Wash the clothes. We have a pending issue with our drain, so we've been rolling our washer from the laundry/dog room outside the back patio. Thank goodness for the rolling platform our vet gave us with it! The drain issue is not entirely averted, and we still almost always end up with a small flood in the laundry room. We've talked to a guy about fixing this, but it seems to be happening on Peruvian time.

2. Hang the clothes to dry. Pull out the stool and start clipping laundry to the line! Our washer is small (6 kg), so we never have that much at once. Our housekeeper has been helping with this task as well.

3. Take the clothes down and iron them. All of them. Remember when I laughed about my neighbor ironing my dishtowels? I did it myself on Saturday. They looked so pitiful all contorted into shapes! With the actual clothes and sheets, I'm more worried about softness than looks, and ironing really does help make them softer. The down side is that, as you can imagine, this is very time-consuming. My Saturday night ironing session lasted through 4 old episodes of 24 (3 hrs?).

My plan with the ironing is to have my housekeeper do most of it. She doesn't have a lot of extra time, but I think she could probably spare 20 minutes a day out of the 4 hours she's here. We'll see how it works. This week I'm saving all the clothes up for her to iron while we're in Lima on Thursday for Thanksgiving.

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