Airing your "clean" laundry

It's a phenomenon that is not unique to Tanzania or Africa for that matter, but it's something that always amazes me. Maybe it's my hyper-active American cleanliness gene. Maybe it's from growing up with a washing machine and dryer that seemed to constantly be in use. What is this phenomenon you ask?: Line-drying your clean laundry on a roof, on a caged balcony, or on a line above your burnt sienna-colored dirt yard.

During this last trip to Tanzania, my hotel room overlooked a number of rooftops in downtown city centre- some businesses, some apartment buildings. Many of the rooftops had, in addition to big clean water drums, laundry lines. [Click on the photo to enlarge it]

I would see the "dadas" (the maids, translated as the "sisters" in Swahili) hanging the laundry in the morning- hopefully after the rains were through for the day. The "anxious mother" comes out in me- "what if the clothes fall on the dirty rooftop?" "how clean is the air really to be drying clothes outside on a roof downtown?" "What if one piece of clothing isn't secured well enough and it goes flying across town?" Calm down, Erin- it's not your laundry. :)

Rooftops and balconies are the options of city dwellers. Dryers are just too expensive and too much of an energy suck for many people. When I think of traditional "Norman Rockwell-esque clotheslines" I picture summer lawns of green green grass, blue skies,open fields, and bright Clorox-white sheets blowing on the lines. Seeing laundry lines on my trips doesn't always generate the same rosy picture. In Iringa, my hotel window overlooks a house (probably a few shacks together)- a picture I've taken numerous times on different trips- sadly the house always looks the same. On that morning, it was raining- raining so hard that the make-shift street drains were overflowing with muddy brown water. I looked out the window and saw laundry lines- clean laundry which had probably been out most of the night now just drenched. A final rinse? [Click on the photo to enlarge it]

And while I didn't get a photo of a clothesline in one of the villages, that's probably as close to "Norman Rockwell" as you can get in Tanzania. A mother or a daughter hanging clothes to dry on a line tied between a tree and the mud hut. One of them most likely sweeping the orange-colored dirt ground as if it were a floor. The clothes flapping in the breeze waiting to dry, be worn again, and washed. Repeat if desired.