Washing Machines

One of the most striking differences between the “developing” and “developed” worlds is how much more time it takes people in the former just to manage everyday life.  You don’t have a car, so you walk everywhere or ride public transportation. You can’t afford pre-cut or prepared foods, so every meal is a time-consuming production. But what we residents of the wealthy West may never have thought of is how much time people in the developing world spend washing clothes.

In East Africa most people wash their laundry by hand, either their own hands or those of someone they hire for the job. If you’ve never washed a pair of jeans by hand, let me tell you it is hard work. I remember two decades ago in Kenya when I had three small children, including an infant in cloth diapers, I found myself for a period of weeks without someone to help me do laundry. I spent at least two hours a day washing clothes. When that brief phase of my life mercifully came to a close my husband Jim declared we would never go through that again. The physical labor had made me terribly grumpy.

So for university students here in Uganda, no dropping quarters or shillings in the Laundromat. Guys and girls alike scrub their clothes in a sudsy bucket of water, wring them out, and hang them up on the communal drying lines.

(Below: laundry lines outside the men’s hostel at UCU on an unfortunately windy afternoon. There's often at least one student outside of the frame of the photo to the left bending over a plastic laundry tub.)

Of course the most important outcome of washing all your clothes by hand isn’t physical exhaustion—African women aren’t as wimpy as I am. As Swedish professor of public health Hans Rosling points out, the hours women all over the world spend hand washing every day are hours not available for going to the library, training their children, educating themselves, and engaging in a whole range of creative pursuits. For this reason Rosling calls the washing machine the greatest invention of the industrial revolution.  (See the link below for his TED talk on the washing machine plus other marvelous videos on public health. http://www.gapminder.org/videos/)

So, if you’re at home when you read this and you’ve got a washing machine, walk into your laundry room right now and thank God for it. It's revolutionizing your life and you didn't even know it!