Since moving to Morocco, I have embraced many cultural norms and realities of life in a developing place. I have mastered the absence of running water, covered my arms and legs on 120+ degree days and eaten parts of animals I really didn't want to eat. For some reason, I cannot seem to master my laundry.
When I first moved into my own place, I enjoyed taking the couple of hours to wash all of my clothes and hang them to dry. Now that I have been doing it for 8+ months, the fun has been drained. Now that its cooler outside and the cold basin water doesn't feel so refreshing anymore, I have begun to resent having to wash my clothing at all.
The hatred sort of came to a head yesterday when I woke up extra early to get started on my wash so it would be dry by nightfall. I am one of the few volunteers without roof access or an outdoor courtyard to hang up my wet laundry. The first few months I was hanging a rope from one of the unfinished rebar pieces sticking out of the building next to mine and securing it to a rock wall attached to the bread ovens. This worked, sort of. At least once a month, the piece of string would fall off the rock and send my newly washed clothes onto the dirty ground below, forcing me to re-rinse everything I had just taken 2 hours to wash.
At first, this was annoying, then it became downright frustrating. Two weeks ago, before our IST training in Marrakech, I did some laundry, hung it out to dry and then poof, the string snapped in half and sent all of my clothes back onto the dirt. I didn't even bother rinsing them off, I just strung my string in a new place and hung them back up. Of course, the falling caused a delay in the drying time, so they werent dry before it got dark. About an hour after sunset, my counterpart collected all of my still wet clothing and knocked on my door, telling me people were going to steal my clothes if I left them out all night. Awesome. (Also, who would want to steal faded, holey, somewhat dirty clothes).
This time I strung up my string in the same place and just as I got the last thing hung, my host mother came by and said she needed to use the bread ovens. The issue being that my string was tied to the door of the ovens. Crap. Since I basically refuse to hang my clothes to dry on the rock wall, mostly because they end up dirtier than when they started, I was in a conundrum.
I went inside grabbed my bin and threw all my wet clothes in the bin, frustrated and aggravated that washing my clothes is never a simple process. After huffing and puffing around for a while and yes, even yelling at my clothing, my counterpart secured a new holder rod into the rocks and went and got me a new string to dry my clothes on.
After she finished making me a new clothing line, I hung up my clothes and sure enough, they didn't fall, at least this time.
Now that my laundry line has been secured and I have started washing my clothes in warm water hopefully things will start looking up on the laundry front. The truth is that I can't wait to go back to America and wash and dry my clothes with little to no effort of my own. Oh the modern luxuries.
Despite the laundry being a pain, all is going well here in Morocco and now that "winter" has set in and our days are still in the low 80's, I cannot complain. I am sure I will not enjoy living in the land of the fire come June, its not too bad in November.
Oh yeah and Claire comes in 38 days and counting! Woo hoo.
