First and foremost, I have a showering routine down finally. This incredibly basic event was a thorn in my side until I figured out what works best (for me) because before I had been showering in ice cold water once a week and going to the hot spring once a week. The hot spring sounds great and all but they do an awful job at water conservation which is a huge issue where I live so I don’t feel super great supporting that business regularly. So my new water conversation friendly routine goes like such: fill up 3 2.5 liter bottles full of glacier water and place them in black bags in the sun. Showering must be done in the mid afternoon for optimal temperature (although a newly purchased tea kettle/water boiler will provide flexibility on showering hours). I shower once every three days and can’t help but laugh because that sounds so gross in American terms but really it’s not that bad. I even kind of like not showering every day, which is ironic because going days without showering was one of my greatest pre-arrival fears. I am finding out that you can get used to most things.
In the US, I hated doing laundry. I didn’t mind starting loads of laundry but the folding the clothes and putting them away was such a drag. I often prolonged it and made it worse though by delaying taking the clothes out of the dryer and then thinking “Oh shoot, I have to fluff the clothes again.” And, of course, I let the laundry pile up massively before I would even get going. Man, those days of luxury are long over! I am now proficient at washing my clothes by hand. It usually takes me about one hour per load and the max I ever do is two loads per week, partly because I don’t have many clothes here and partly because I don’t wash things after one wear unless there is a really compelling reason. When you wash every piece of clothing by hand, your definitions of clean suddenly shift. It’s also impossible to procrastinate on laundry here as you’ll run out of something- usually heavy socks for me. So when you guys over yonder are getting up and going to work and you think of me, I might just be hunched over a tub of cold water, scrubbing away.
On a different note, I have a camera that claims it is “Dust proof”. When I bought it, I was interested in the other promises like “Water resistant” and “Shock proof” but little did I know “Dust proof” was what I should have been concerned with. Dust is everywhere. I sweep my floor all the time and dust my dresser but it is instantly dusty again. Because many of the roads are unpaved and there is often a lot of wind (at least this time of year) in the afternoon, dust is absolutely inescapable. When I first got to site, I thought all the plates were super dirty but now I realize that a lot of them are stained by the dust. Did you know this was possible?! I do now but not before I volunteered myself to wash the dishes and from that I learned that I can get them no cleaner looking. I still wash dishes a lot as I like being in control of the cleanliness of the plates.
I realize this theme may interest me more than you, poor reader. In terms of American standards this stuff all sounds really basic and weird to care about but it’s crazy how you have to unlearn every routine or basic task you have every learned and relearn it in a different way. We really do take little routines for granted until you get stared at a lot because you always do things weirdly. (Why are you washing your clothes in the afternoon? No one washes their clothes in the afternoon! Why did you throw the toilet paper in the toilet? It goes in the waste basket! Why did you put all your garbage in a bag? You have to separate the paper and the other parts!) Thankfully, I am starting to get things down the American in rural, Peru way too.
(PS- the reasons why are the following: The clothes don’t dry in time if you wash them in the afternoon but they will be fully dry by the end of the day if you wash them in the morning. The septic/sewer systems in Peru cannot handle paper. It will clog the pipes. And as for the garbage, my family burns the paper. I still haven’t figured out what they do with the rest. I smuggle my garbage out of my house and throw it away in a garbage can in a different town usually- ridiculous I know.)
The pictures are of my family on the farm! My job was to hoe.
