airing my dirty laundry

In keeping with my current practice of airing my dirty undies on the blog, a funny thing happened to me last week. I was doing my laundry. This is an energetic process where I stand in the back yard with a couple of buckets of water and a blue plastic wash tub and make an attempt at scrubbing that no self-respecting Peruvian alma de casa would take for cleaning. There is a waste water system in town and it's new, so people are still getting used to using it. The only connection to the waste water system in our house is the toilet, so all waste water that doesn't get dumped in the yard goes down the toilet. I had successfully washed all of my clothes and was starting the rinse process, so I went to dump out the soapy dirty water down the toilet. As the water flowed out of the bucket so did a fairly new pair of white cotton panties which had been camouflaged by the grayish water. I dropped the bucket and with my other hand tried to grab the errant undies from the toilet but they slipped off the tips of my fingers and down into the nether regions of the new waste water system. Deep breath. Now I'm in Peru in the desert using very little water to try to get clean and I have my arm in the toilet about up to the elbow. I'm thinking, ¨Oh no! What if my undies stop-up the toilet? This is the only toilet for 7 household members! EEEK!¨ So I fish around in the nether regions some more since my hand is conveniently down the toilet anyway, but it was tough times because I started to retch when my thoughts started to drift to all the times that the water didn't agree with me and I was sitting on that toilet wondering how I was the only one in the house with explosive diarrhea. So I pulled my hand out of the toilet. Washed, washed some more, clipped my nails and washed again, got up some courage and did the only thing that I could think of- tell a household member that I may have stopped up their toilet but flushing my panties down a toilet where flushing means dumping a bucket of water- or 3- down the toilet until the color is clear and there are no floaters.

Even though the water did seem to be flushing when I dumped another bucket or two down the chute to test it out I could just see the toilet stopping up in a week and poor Martin sitting there trying to figure out what the hell was wrong, so to avoid this I decided I had to discuss this with someone. As I tried in my very best in very professional and respectful Spanish to explain this to the only family member at home- the dad, Martin- he turned bright red and started to giggle hysterically. I did likewise. We decided not to worry about them until the toilet actually stopped up. It has been a week and all seems fairly clear- so fingers crossed that there will be no taking off the toilet and fishing around in the pipes. Did I mention that they were new?!

Guess what I want for Christmas!

Merry Christmas!