Doing Laundry

There are many serious issues to reflect on in this blog. But it is also fun and so interesting to ruminate on the everyday experiences, including what it was like living on campus, and how we kept our physical environment clean and healthy. 

We did a good job of figuring out how to feed ourselves, which was no small task, but it turned out our biggest challenge was being able to clean our clothes. 

I will never again take my washing machine for granted. 

We could hire someone to do our wash for us, as the two other short-term Fulbrighters did. But we don’t mind doing our own laundry, and quite honestly, like having control over what happens to our clothes. Being at the laundry was also a great opportunity to have unplanned meetings with students – I have had some of my best conversations with students, and learned so many things, hanging out by the washing machines. It also gives us a window onto their living conditions. 

 

The campus "laundry facility" serves those living on campus full-time. Most of the faculty and staff live in Paro or Thimphu, and if they stay on campus at all, they go home on weekends or when they don’t have classes, taking their dirty clothes with them. So it's mostly students with a few of the rest of us, around about 120 people, left to work with 4 washing machines and 1 dryer housed in a large open-air shed, and multiple strings of drying lines (some under cover, some not). One hundred and twenty people. 4 washers. Some of which didn't always work. 

 

The shed housing the washers is tucked back behind the library, next to the shacks that the workers live in; in fact, when visitors come to campus, they are told that that’s “just” worker housing back there, never mentioning that is also the campus laundry. 

 

Getting to it means walking down a dirt road to a trail that crosses a small stream, and then climbing back up the other side. The dirt road in the dry season is fine, but during the rainy season it turns to mud. Early in the semester, as preparations for the campus consecration were in full swing, there was a lot of truck traffic on that road – the more traffic there was, with the ongoing rain, the deeper and deeper the ruts got. During hard rains, the ruts would be full of ankle deep mud, the kind that would suck your shoes off.

 

Headed out to the laundry, visible below the top left of the photo.

Jay and I began picking up large rocks and pieces of wood when we would go out there, and lay them along the edge of the road so that there would be a passable path to get through the worst of it without everyone soaking their feet.

Balancing a backpack full of clean clothes back to the dorm.

 

The dirt road leads to a pathway which heads downhill and crosses a little rivulet on deteriorated old boards. It was often a challenge to balance this crossing, carrying laundry, soap and bucket while avoiding the worst of the boards’ rotting spots, especially in the rain, which made the boards crazy slippery. Success meant avoiding a twisted ankle from stepping into a hole, or slipping off the side entirely and crashing. 

As the semester went on, the boards rotted more and more, and this crossing got to be nearly unpassable.

 

Taking advantage of my role as consultant to the Office of Student Affairs, I convinced my dean to do something, and he blissfully organized a group of students to build a lovely new bamboo-and-board bridge before the semester ended.

 

 

From the bridge, the path climbs up a series of uneven steps to get to the top of the hill where the machines are. Some of the steps are concrete, but some are dirt and are badly eroded and uneven, and, of course, terribly slick and muddy when it rains. Another balancing trick, while carrying laundry, bucket, soap, etc. 

 

One day I watched two students navigating the bridge and steps in the rain while sharing the handles of a very large bucket of dirty laundry between them, with one holding an umbrella to cover them both. I was impressed at their fortitude - and their need to do laundry. 

For some reason, the steps to the laundry, which were in constant use, were not built solid and sturdy like many others on campus - such as this beautifully constructed set of stairs that went nowhere, and was hardly ever used. 

 

Why can’t we have steps like this out to the laundry!

 

This whole trek to just do a load of laundry became much easier after the rainy season ended and the days were dry. But getting there was no guarantee of actually being able to do laundry.

 

 The first hurdle is whether there is water. The water supply to the campus comes from up the mountain, and I was never clear where it exactly came from or how it got to campus, I just know that there were many rubber hoses snaking all around the mountain above campus and through Pangbisa – we would see many different hoses on our walks but never knew which were supplying the water or whether there was actually water in them. Sometimes there wasn’t. Which raises the question of building in places with insufficient resources to support everyone. But that's another issue, and another blog post.

 

But if there was water, and none of the occasional issues with the power, the next step is finding an empty machine. 120 people, 4 washers. And if there is an empty machine, is it one of the ones that doesn’t leak, or one that can actually spin the clothes? 

 

And if there is an empty machine of choice, and there is water and power, the water pressure is so weak that the machine fills up v e r y slowly. We learned the trick of filling a bucket at the spigots next to the machines (for doing laundry by hand), and filling up the machine with the bucket. That way at least the first cycle gets going quickly. We also use the fastest cycle the machines will allow - so that it wouldn’t take 4 hours to finish a load - but we were never sure how clean our clothes really were. 

 

The bamboo fence is to keep cows from wandering into the laundry.

High tech alternative to fixing a leaky faucet.

Sometimes clothes would come from the finished washer that had barely spun them out, so everything is heavy with water and drying is even more of a challenge. 

 

There were a number of drying lines strung up outside the shed with the washers, and when the weather was good it wouldn’t take very long to get clothes dry out in the open air, as long as there was space to hang them. Ghos and kiras take up a lot of space when they're stretched out! There were also lines under the cover of the shed, which were sought after during the rainy season - we would leave those for the students, who didn’t have other options for drying their clothes if the single dryer wasn't available. We had hung up a drying line in our apartment, which we would always use for our "delicate" wash since we figured that it wasn’t a good thing for students to see their professors’ underwear hanging up alongside theirs! But when it was too rainy, or got too cold to get anything dry outside, we’d just bring it all back in with us and hang it in the warmth of our one working heater. We have come to appreciate what a luxury a dryer is.

 

 

We spent quite a bit of brain power strategizing the best timing to get laundry done. Jay is the master of our laundry. He would often load dirty clothes into a backpack at night, then get up at 5 or 6 in the morning to head out to find an empty machine, quite often successfully. 

It always feels like a great accomplishment when we get everything washed and dry.

 

It also gives us a window into how the administration views the students, who are required to live on campus full-time. That the school cannot provide adequate facilities to serve a basic need like cleaning clothes is frustrating and sad. Too often, student needs are not central to the functioning of this campus. Working with the office of student affairs, I frequently ran into roadblocks for doing things that to me seemed simple but necessary for making the campus more supportive for students' success and creating community. I realize how much I appreciate the educational institutions I have worked at that are student-centered, where you get to consider how to best serve the students and support their potential.

I hear that the laundry is going to be rebuilt over winter break, with more washers  and dryers, but it will still be out on the edge of the campus, not inside one of the campus buildings. The students don’t really complain about it, they just take what it is, and I suspect many of them come from homes where they do all their laundry outside by hand year round, so maybe this is just a lot of privileged whining. But the students have so many demands on them at this school, and very little time, so we will see, if the laundry improvements happen, whether their lives get a little easier. Or they at least have one less reason to stay up all night.