Those of you who have been to our house in the past… well, ever, will probably be amused to know that here in the jungle I sweep a minimum of three times a day. It’s the first thing I do after I get dressed in the morning, I do it after every meal and snack, and it’s usually necessary on at least one random occasion during the day.
You see, living in a house with rather arbitrary walls and a serious ant population, any little crumb or dead bug can lead to a Biblical-scale number of insect scavengers in the blink of an eye. Dirt, too, is a problem, but mainly it’s the ants. In this reality, there is no leaving the dishes in the sink overnight or being casual about the smooshed cracker under the table. Heck, even with all these precautions, there’s a continuous stream of ants marching across our countertops and scouting our floors in hopes that Dean left them a morsel.
That’s not the only thing that’s different. We can’t flush toilet paper here, so the bathroom trash must be changed daily. There’s no dishwasher (no great loss, since the one at home is so ineffective). No vacuum (oh, how I miss my Dyson!). And of course, the kiddos are still doing their very best to trash the house every waking moment. I could easily spend half my time on housekeeping each day, but I value my sanity more than a clean home. On the plus side, our hosts’ housekeeper is coming to clean for us tomorrow for the insanely low rate of $2/hour. I am pretty darn psyched about that! We have the option of hiring her once a week while we’re here, and I think I’d be a fool not to.
One thing that has been interesting about keeping house in the jungle is the laundry. To refresh your memories, here’s the laundry sink:
If I want to wash clothes, I carry them outside to the sink, then scrub them by hand with a little detergent, rinse, and put them on the clothesline to dry. This process must be started at the crack of dawn if you want to have any hope of having the clothes dry that day. It’s so humid here in the afternoon that clothes have to come off the line by about 2, regardless of whether they’re dry. If they aren’t I hang them around the house and put them back on the line the following morning. It’s surreal to have this much planning going into laundry!
Our hosts do have a little laundry service here on the property. It’s awesome to drop off clothes in the morning and have them delivered fresh and folded that afternoon. The catch is that it is very expensive. Consider this — last week I paid $15 for a bag of laundry that I could have easily fit into a single load in my washer at home. $15! And yet I’ll be paying about $10 tomorrow for someone to clean my house top to bottom…. the economy here is weird.
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Everyone should have to wash laundry this way at some point in their lives. Really makes you appreciate laundry technology!
Thanks much for sharing these details of Latin American life. It’s bringing back all kinds of visceral memories!