Getting intimate with dust: Laundry in Cambodia

I started out in Cambodia doing my own laundry. That was back when I lived in the real wilds, down a dirt road in the midst of a dusty village of wood and stone houses. A neighborhood romantically named Handsome Village.

My self-laundering confidence started high. Along with lessons on how to pee while squatting and how to shower with a pan of water, we new Peace Corps volunteers received a “how to wash your clothes in a bowl” demonstration from one of the more weathered volunteers.

Washing clothes without a machine is easy, the volunteer told us. Simply dump your clothes in a large bowl and add water and soap. Remove dirt and dust by rubbing the fabric together with your hands, or by using a scrub brush.

Simple, right? Wrong. My laundry confidence plummeted when I learned, that like many things in life, washing clothes by hand is not as easy as it looks.

Fortunately, my host family was eager to help. A little too eager. Noticing my incompetency, my 17-year-old, pregnant host sister immediately took over my laundry.

I mock protested, insisting I could scrub my own stains. After a few psuedo battles, my host sister relented, and hired me as her assistant. I was assigned underwear duty. Who wants to handwash someone else’s underwear, anyway?

The answer: my former host grandma. That bony old woman would clamber on the eating table, stick her wrinkled brown walnut face into my undie bowl, open her mouth with its few betel-red-stained teeth — and laugh.

Her laugh would summon the other yays (Khmer for grandmas) of Handsome Village. “Come get a load of this barang trying to wash her unmentionables!” the laugh seemed to say.

It was too much for me. I turned mean. I learned how to say “Leave me alone!” in Khmer, and then I said it.

My meanness worked. The old woman and her shaved head came around less, and when she came around, it usually wasn’t to stare at my dirty underwear. It was to stroke my white arms.

I don’t live in Handsome Village anymore. I live at a French orphanage at the opposite end of Cambodia. But the orphanage’s French name is almost as romantic as my former village’s.

My new(er) home is also adorned with lovely gardens filled with trees, bushes and brightly colored flowers, and perfectly behaved, skipping children.

But the orphanage's best feature is hidden from view, in a small room behind a locked door: the wash machine.

The young French man that manages the orphanage told me about the wash machine upon my arrival. He said I could either spend hours a day washing my clothes with my hands or have someone else wash my clothes for me, in the machine. Difficult choice.

I enjoyed five glorious months of machine washing done by someone else. I was simply required to set my hamper full of dirty clothes in front of the machine room. The next day, the hamper would magically return to my house, full of clean, neatly folded clothes.

This system worked wonderfully — until I realized that none of my clothes were actually clean.

I came to this realization during my week in India, with the aid of a bright hotel light that revealed things beyond the capabilities of my weak Cambodian lights.

In India, I saw what I couldn’t see in Cambodia. My whites were gray. My blues were brown. My flowers were mud splats.

I gave up the machine. Wash machines don’t work in Cambodia, many Cambodians told me. The country’s too dusty.

So, I’m back to being intimate with my dust. Once again, I spend several hours a week — sometimes a day — hunched over an oversized plastic bowl full of cold water and soap.

It’s hard work, but at least I can now do the work in the solitude of my bathroom, absent of the prying eyes of an over-curious grandma.

Now I can also admire the flowers on my skirt and the blue of my blouses. My whites never quite returned to white, but, hey, that’s Cambodia.

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NOTE: The contents of this Web site are mine and do not reflect any position of the U.S. government or the Peace corps. This blog is not an official publication of the Peace Corps or of the United States government.