“Ahhhhhh!!!! IT'S BLEACH!!!”
Yep. It sure was. All ove rhalf of the few clothes we have. We now have khaki spotted shorts, a lovely pinkish white mark on a gray cardigan, along with many other clothing items sprinkled with the clear, deadly liquid.
So, I'm sure you are wondering how this whole debacle transpired. Well, last weekend, Kaitlyn, Jen and I went on a little adventure to Hope of Life International. We were greatly blessed with beds, air conditioning, a pool AND a washer and dryer. (It's the small things people!) Kaitlyn and I ecstatically decided to do all the laundry we brought before moving on to our next country, Honduras, due to the fact that we didn't know what the laundry conditions would look like there. Since we didn't plan on doing laundry before coming this weekend we didn't bring any of our own detergent, but, to our surprise, we noticed the fun sized “detergent” packets located above the wash machine. We threw our clothes into the wash machine and Kaitlyn proceeded to open the packet with her teeth. As she poured it over the clothes, I was surprised at the clear, liquidly consistency of it, but just assumed that liquid detergent here is different than back home. Seconds later, Kaitlyn reopened the wash machine, exclaiming “ahhhh I think that was bleach!!!” We glanced down at our clothes, watching the spots rapidly appear. Dang it. It's times like these you really wanta just call your mom and ask what the HECK to do!
Not knowing what to do, we just started pulling all of our clothes out of the wash machine, inspecting them for new, blotchy patterns. By this point, the laundry room floor was sopping wet, we were half covered in bleach ourselves (side note: we didn't have many clothes since we decided to wash pretty much everything. Somehow both of us ended up wearing black spandex and black camis. Doing laundry ninja style? No big deal). Anyway, so not knowing what to do, we ran to get our new friend John who was in the room next door. The poor guy was quite unhelpful but did come to observe our silly sea serpent situation. He laughed. The little Guatemalan man who was also doing his laundry laughed. We couldn't help but laugh too. At that point, the damage was done; all we could do was laugh at how we neglected to read a simple, yet important label.
Fortunately, one of the other volunteers here, Emily, graciously let us use some of her laundry detergent. At the end of the day, at least we have clean, good smelling clothes. Again, its the small things :).
Maybe this is just part of the whole abandonment process. Perhaps it's God's way of showing us that it's not the clothes we wear that makes us beautiful or makes us who were are. But we were created in His image. So we are going to wear our bleached clothes with our heads held high.
The moral of the story: when in Guatemala, only use powdered detergent.
Our ninja laundry outfits!
