Laundry

If you have ever had a child, imagine this for a minute... There are no disposable products, so diapers are all cloth, and the plastic covers for them are too big, so they leak. You have no baby wipes, so every time you clean up diapers or spit up, it's with a cloth rag. Then there are the clothes (which get wet every time the diapers leak), and the sheets (same). Bibs get dirty after every meal and snack.  When you have a baby, you do a lot of laundry. 

Now multiply that by 19, and throw in a few days with no running water. Oh, and did I mention that it's rained for three days straight, so the laundry that you HAVE managed to wash can't dry?!  

That's what's going on at Sangalo Babies right now. I'm here to tell you that several of us did laundry all day today, and it's STILL not done!!!!  

When we arrived, the sky was clear, the laundry lady was washing like crazy, and the clothes were being hung to dry. She washed, and we hung... Eight (tall!) baskets worth. Blankets, bibs, diapers, clothes, burp rags, socks... All of it had to go somewhere. There was not an available bush or tree branch when we finished. 

 The picture above is about 60% of the laundry we hung. And the mattresses... Many of them soaked because of leaky diapers through sheets. 

Then, about 20 min after we hung the last basket full, the sky looked like this...

And so, while half of the people wrangled babies inside, the rest of us collected ALL of the laundry we had just hung, put it back in the baskets, and took it inside. It bears mentioning that it was VERY helpful to be outside with the children because there were literally NO clean and dry diapers. Damili used the emergency disposable ones yesterday, and today, there were none. All of the children were naked from the waist down. Outside, this is ok. Inside... Trickier than you can imagine!  

This picture is for anyone who has ever potty trained multiple children at the same time. :-) (I wish it was a movie... They were NOT this still!). ;-)

Robert and Bob

Finally, after lunch, everyone had a bath (they had to bring in water because there was still no running water due to the storm on Monday night), then got a clean, dry diaper (someone bought her a new pack of cloth diapers), and lay down for a nap. 

 The storm had finally passed, so we set to work rehanging the eight baskets of laundry to dry, all the while praying that they would dry before it rains again!  

I am going to hang this picture in my laundry room, lest I ever again complain that I have too much laundry!  

Here's the real kicker... 

See the box Robert is sitting beside?  It's a washing machine. Next to it... A dryer. You see, a donor in the States purchased these for Damili, but... This donor is coming to Uganda at the end of the month and has asked her to wait to open and use them until they are here. I'm not judging (ok, yes I am, but I am also repenting of every time I may have ever put someone in this position.)  I'm just saying that there is a real life going on in the mission fields.. Beyond our blog pictures and idealistic notions are real people, who are really living in conditions that really don't seem like they can wait another day. If there's anything we can do to make their lives easier, we want to do it.  Now.  Not sometime in the future when it's convenient for us. Today, it was about hanging laundry... Twice.