the road to clean uniforms

Our children attend Quisqueya Christian School and are required to wear uniforms consisting of a white polo shirt and navy shorts. In the States, it would seem normal that four days would be enough time to have clean uniforms ready for Monday morning. This, however, is Haiti and I am now the laundry police! It is Monday morning at six a.m. and not one clean white polo shirt can be found! Why, you may ask? This is now where we need to back up and start at the beginning.

We all know that in order to do laundry you have to have power. Power can be in the form of the generator or EDH (city power), but not the inverter for laundry. Starting on Thursday we had a few hours of EDH in which I washed towels. Not towels for four mind you, towels for twelve. The second half of the day the guys worked on installing the new inverter since the old batteries wouldn't charge for more than about two hours. This left us with no power at all and a machine half full of water and clothes soaking. Not to worry, we finally got the new inverter up and running. Saturday would be a new day! At 6:30 a.m. Parker tapped my shoulder and said, "Mama, the house is flooded." We woke up to the front of the house filled with water from the bathroom that flooded over night as we slept. Now we had power but the guys would be working on the toilet and trying to get the sand out of the filter on the washing machine so it didn't take three hours to do one load. This would mean we would have to shut off the pump. Again, not to worry, mission accomplished! We would be up and running on Sunday. I was catching on to the routine, getting up at six a.m. (or earlier) would give me a few hours of EDH if I was lucky and I would get one load in a day. Sunday was the day! Out the front door I went to start yet one more load. Unfortunately, by the time we left at 7:45 for church I was left with another load sitting in the machine soaking. We had no power and you can't leave the generator run for hours with no one home.

Now that you are caught up let's start again. It is Monday, 6:00 a.m. and the alarm in going off for school. We still have no clean shirts and I am digging through a pile of laundry big enough to make you laugh looking for two white polo shirts. Asking myself which ones looked the cleanest and didn't smell like three day old towels used to mop up after the overflow from the front bathroom (clean water by the way), dirty socks and dish rags? I finally found the two that would pass the test (sort of), got out the iron, ironing over the dirt and grass stains, sending Maddie and Parker off to school, praying they didn't smell really bad.

It is now 2:30 and I am happy to report that I have done five loads with the generator running long enough to charge the inverters so we will have fans for the night! But that is a whole different story!!