The Saga of Washing Clothes

So in Guyana, teachers are given a great deal of respect. With that respect naturally comes responsibility. One area of responsibility is in the way you dress. So, in most schools, male teachers are expected to wear khakis or slacks and some sort of button-down shirt. Due to a misinterpretation of the rules before I left, I only brought 3 button down shirts.* This means I don't have many options for school clothes, especially since one of the shirts tends to get pretty wrinkled when hand washed, and I hate ironing**. After school yesterday I realized that I was out of clean dress shirts, meaning it was time to do laundry. Laundry consists of filling a bucket with soapy water, hand-washing the clothes and then hanging your clothes on a line outside to dry. While I was horrible when I started, I'm now getting a little better and washing clothes is not an obscene chore, especially if I break it up so the loads are manageable.

I get my washing done after class, hang it up in the afternoon sun, under the dormitory building where I'm living. All is well, the clothes, especially my thin dress shirts, should be dry by morning. Then of course, the rain came. I'm talking biblical rainstorms. It started raining at about 9pm and rained off and on all night. Now Guyana has a rainy season, but we have been told that it has just recently passed, though we can expect short showers and the like. I've been in the country over 4 weeks now, and this is by far the most intense rain I've seen. So there I am, lying in bed, listening to my clothes get soaked. All I could think about was how everyone would be talking about how the US teacher is so sloppy and unprofessional in his jersey (t-shirt with a collar, or polo) at school.

Fortunately, when I got up this morning, one of my shirts was mostly dry. I put it next to a fan while I had breakfast and got ready for class, and by the time I was heading out, it was only slightly damp. So I wore it. I guess the overhang of the dorm protected it from the worst, and like I said, it is a pretty thin shirt. Disaster averted, but now I know I have to be a little more conscious of the perils of line drying all your school clothes at once...



*We discovered today that at my school, teachers can wear polo shirts, so my wardrobe has expanded a little. However, I haven't noticed any of the Guyanese teachers wearing polo shirts, so I'm going to tread cautiously. It would have saved me some strife today, though.

**Really this whole situation could be avoided if I'd just bothered to pick up some dress shirts down here as well as an iron, but naturally I haven't gotten around to it yet. Some things never change.