My Way or the Not Correct Way

I’ve discovered that many times down here in Honduras there is one way to do things correctly. It’s not unfounded, there really is a best way when it comes to a lot of things down here. For example, washing clothes…Tyler and I decided to get some laundry done by hand this afternoon. We went out to the “pila” as it’s called and tried to figure it out. I had to ask the little girl next door to show me how to wash my clothes. Let me tell you, there are few things in life more humbling than asking help from a small child on something so simple as washing your clothes. I’m sure she’s thinking, “who in the world doesn’t know how to do this?!” She’s probably been working with the pila for the better part of her life.

Anyways, I get it figured out more or less. Fill one part with water, then there’s a place to scrub the clothes on the “ribs” of the pila with soap. Then take a pitcher and pour water over the clothes, washing it off, then hanging it up on the line to dry. So I start filling it with water and out pops the other neighbor. He asks if we have soap and I tell him, “yes.” So naturally he tells us to hold on a second and runs back in to grab us some soap. The soap here is “better” apparently than ours. As it turns out, the soap smells really good, gets dirt out amazingly well, and even gives our clothes super powers! Ok, that last part is a lie, but the soap is amazing. We cleaned our dirty clothes with dirty water and amazing soap and the result was really good smelling and clean clothes, who knew?

I wonder how many more things we will run into down here that we don’t do correctly. I used to get frustrated by their ignorance to think that a Honduran could possibly know a better way to wash clothes by hand than me, the smart college educated American. Ha, isn’t that a funny mindset? At least I find it to be now that I’ve learned better than to act like I know what I’m doing when I’ve never in my entire life washed clothes in a “pila.”