Lets first flashback to my days in America. Laundry might as well be the death of me. I hate laundry. No seriously, I hate it. I wait as long as I can before I have to do laundry and even then I will just do a load of undies/panties so I don’t have to do it all. At home, I have so many clothes I can go a few months without doing laundry. It makes me a little nauseous to admit that.
Let go to present day Latin America life. Here I have like 7 shirts, 5 bottoms and some undieswhich means laundry day happens way more often. Month 1 my laundry was done in a bucket that by day was a trashcan. You could say my laundry was “clean”. Then month 2 came along and my home had a pilla. This pilla was all cement and a first slightly moldy until we cleaned it. You use a pilla by wetting your clothes rubbing some soap on it and then scrubbing it with the ridges on the pilla. It is a process that’s for sure and sometimes it is draining.
I fell in love with that pilla month 2. I learned to love to do laundry. It’s almost as though the world stops when you are at the pilla. 2 hours goes by and it feels like you just started. My teammate and I would do our laundry side-by-side laughing amuck about life. Not only would we laugh at life we would divulge into deep conversations. We would talk about difficult times in our life, about things that may not have come up without the power of the pilla.
Month 2, not only did I do laundry with my teammate but I did laundry with new friends. We stood side-by-side washing clothes, discussing the world, telling and processing our days. Or we would just listened to music and sing at the top of our lungs. I became close to people just by doing laundry together. I even would do others laundry because I enjoyed it. Life happens at a pilla.
Today, I went to do laundry at a new pilla. My teammate looks at me and declares, “I don’t know how I am going to laundry in the states. It will be weird doing it without you.” We laughed and figured out that we would Facetime when we did laundry back in the states.
After about 2.5 hours and lots of clean clothes, we headed back to the church. To say that those 2.5 hours were the most peaceful 2.5 hours in Honduras would be accurate. Time stopped and we laughed and joked about how good we were getting at doing our laundry by hand.
Its funny to think and say that this concrete slab is comforting but it is verdad. Its true. Life happens around a pilla and it is glorious. So Lord, I thank you for pillas and handwashing clothes even when there was a washer right beside me.
