Living for Disco

I don’t have a washing machine. After years of taking laundry for granted, it seemed like a small sacrifice to make in the name of volunteering for a Good Cause*. So, I didn’t expect to have a washing machine in Namibia, and had resigned myself to two years of wearing my clothes until they turned brown and fell off hand washing in a plastic tub. I optimistically imagined that this was going to finish off my bingo wings once and for all, and that I would return to the UK with beautifully toned arms and a six pack, all as a result of spending a morning on my knees twice a week, scrubbing as a good scrubber should.

It hasn’t really turned out like that, mainly because I have a bathtub. I never realized how wonderful bathtubs could be until I started doing all my handwashing in them. It goes like so:

Step 1: Run an extremely hot bath and dump clothes in.
Step 2: Put OMO washing powder on top.
Step 3: Watch a DVD while all skin and hair in clothes dissolves thanks to incredible caustic powers of OMO.
Step 4: Step into water, now the colour of crude oil, and stomp up and down on clothes.
Step 5: Run a rinse. Dump clothes in. Stomp on them for 30 seconds.
Step 6: Have a cup of tea, and read a book.
Step 7: Run another rinse.
Step 8: Open a beer, and stomp up and down on clothes until bored.
Step 9: Hang clothes on washing line.
It’s so easy.

Unfortunately, no amount of stomping and OMO seems to have any effect on my white towels, or on my pale coloured bedclothes. Handwashing does not remove hair from sheets. It does not get brown ick off white towels. Don’t even ask me how the brown ick got there in the first place – this is Namibia, land of dust and sand. And I took them camping. I am not to blame.

So tomorrow, I’m going to try and weasel my way into my friend Tariq’s good graces, in the hope that he will let me use his washing machine to wash my whites in.

I can’t tell you how terribly excited I am about this.