The Pila
Copan Ruinas is a small town and one in which word travels swiftly. This point was underscored several times during our first week of in-service at our school. Apparently previous teachers has suffered due to the small town rumor mill. A couple of standard precautions were suggested to prevent negative attention; don’t drink in the bars, say hello to everyone all the time, and don’t drink in the bars.
Koali and I got our first taste of the speed at which information travels here yesterday when it appeared as though stories of our laundry habits were traveling faster than we were.
The most of the locals here use a pila to do their laundry. For those unfamiliar, a pila is a big cement or brick sink with an accompanying scrubbing board built in. It’s used primarily for washing laundry, but doubles as a water storage tank (for the frequent water outages).
When we first moved in, our delightful landlady Donila asked if we wanted a pila on our deck. There was a space were one should be, so we said beuno! Sadly progress on our pila has been slow. Despite assurances that it would be completed “manaña”, our pila remains incomplete. Donila invited us to use her pila downstairs, but we didn’t take her up on the offer.
A Day’s Work (two bricks laid):
Progress Continues:
Having been in Central America for two weeks now, we had pretty much worn every garment we packed (with some notable long-sleeved exceptions). With tomorrow being the first day of school, we decided to bite the bullet, do the touristy thing, and take our dirty clothes to a laundry service. For 8 lempiras (about .45 cents) a pound we got everything washed, dried, and folded.
On the way back from picking up our laundry we ran into a couple of the local staff from school and were promptly chastised for getting our laundry done for us. Koali explained that our pila wasn’t complete yet. Eva reminded us that Alexis, the school’s account said that there was a pila downstairs we could use. Snap! Luckily we made it upstairs with our clean laundry without Donila seeing us.
This morning however Donila clearly had heard about our disapointing move. She reminded us that we could use her pila until ours was done. It’s manual laundry from here on out…
February 14th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
And the status of the pila currently? And the usage factor? Rachel told me that Nikki has HER laundery done for her too. Hmmmmmm. Silently judging with pursed lips and squinty eyes.