You do not do your own laundry.

Many of my friends have asked how my three week trip to Senegal was. The short answer is “unequivocally wonderful”, but here's something a little more:

There are many things that make Senegal different from the US or England. For instance, the milk is warmer than the showers. That’s not a bad thing though, because even if hot showers were an option, I would have preferred the Spanish Inquisition to taking them; the temperature in Dakar on the day that I left was a roasting 45˚C, or 113˚F. On the other hand, I still don’t enjoy warm milk.

Senegal is also the only place I have ever been where water comes in bags, and the peanuts come in bottles, although I'm told must of West Africa is the same.

There were also some infrastructural difficulties.

One of them was almost constant power cuts. I was already very used to them after 10months of ALA and Mr. Peter’s energy-sapping naps, but Senegal made me put on my rose-tinted glasses. The country is proof that the government should not be allowed to control a utilities monopoly. In Dakar we had power for around 15 hours of the day. When we went to teach in Joal-Fadiouth, that number went down. I didn’t mind too much, but then tragedy struck, and Linda was cut off mid-hair-straightening.

It was truly disastrous.

My trip also marked the first time that I washed my clothing by hand, and it is repetitive and unenjoyable. People who have been doing it for all their life are no doubt laughing at me now, but I will now try to give you an idea of my laundry background. When I first went to boarding school in 2006, I was offered a choice between using the dorm washing machines and paying for laundry service, and I chose the latter. For the next four years, my friends who had chosen to “do it themselves” infProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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med me with pride, and I always felt inferior. After my trip to Senegal though, I have come to realise that they weren’t really doing their own laundry at all.

This year, I too regularly using washing machines, and I too was proud of my independence. But was I manually soaping each part of the shirt and scrubbing it against other parts of the shirt? Were my hands raw from the friction, and did my forearms hurt from wringing everything out twice? Was I dying to hang my clothes up just so I could stretch out my back, which hurt from bending over a bucket? No, I was adding soap and pushing buttons; the machine was “doing the laundry”, not me.


Does it make me a less spoiled person that I have washed my shorts by hand once? Absolutely not. But there are billions of people in the world “do their own laundry”, and if you use a washing machine, you are not amongst them.