The kids at wings of hope go through three outfits a day. They're changed in the mornings, and they inevitably have to change out of whatever they're put in at some point in the afternoon, and again the next morning.
This means that on any given laundry morning, we are washing upwards of 105 articles of clothing. And the 35 blankets that they sleep with.
Every morning. By hand.
And it isn't laundry like you and I know.
We're in the third world. In wheelchairs. In diapers. In disabilities.
Laundry isn't done on Sundays, so when I come to help with washing on Monday morning, you can double that number.
210 garments, and 70 blankets.
To say that it's overwhelming. Well that would be an understatement.
It's terrifying. These clothes are filthy. They're covered in urine. In vomit. In sweat and spit. In feces. In particles of dried food, and matted hair.
It takes about an hour to drop the bucket into the cistern and draw out enough water to dump into the large drums below. Gallon after gallon.
Your hands ache and cramp and blister. Your back muscles throb and strain. The sun beats down, in that one particular place on the back of your neck, and your temple. Sweat beads up and drips into your eyes.
It's 8:35 in the morning now.
With enough water pulled up and waiting in the drums, you can start.
Transferring bucket after bucket of water from these drums, it's poured into shallow and wide pales. Washing bowls, really.
The soap and the bleach are added, and the assembly line commences.
The clothes are wrapped in soiled blankets and thrown down from the balconies with seismic thuds.
They're lifted by one of the boys and brought around the side of the house. The blanket is untied, and the clothes are sorted. By color, by consistency, by degree of dirty.
And then the real work begins. The soap is thick and course. It scrapes unwieldingly into the cracks and creases of your hands. Grainy and sticky, it's ground into the bottom of the bowl, and bleach and water is added. The smell is pungent. It burns your nostrils and sears your eyes. It stings your cuticles and all the various cuts and scrapes cry out. A paper cut has a big voice when submerged in bleach and water.
It dries out your skin and leathers it.
I will never forget the feeeling of holding one of my Haitian friend's hands.
They don't feel like our hands. Calloused and dense. Gloved in dead skin. These are the hands of hard work.
Of a hard life.
And they are unapologetic.
Real hands.
I want to hold on tight.
Sometimes in the night, I brush my hair away from my face, and I can feel the toughness of my fingertips.
I am working, and changing.
And I hope, that long after the calouses are smoothed away, and the skin is soft.
I hope these hands remember what it felt like.
To work for everything you have.
