Dec 29, 2024
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50 million Indians have no access to effective hand-wash: Study
50 million Indians have no access to effective hand-wash: Study
More than 50 million people in India do not have access to effective hand-wash, putting them at a greater risk of acquiring and transmitting the novel coronavirus, according to a study.
Researchers from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in the US found that without access to soap and clean water, over 2 billion people in low-and middle-income…
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lofi hip hop beats to hand-wash to
**Review post** Method cleaning products
**Review post** Method cleaning products
I’m sick to death with the amount of chemicals in cleaning products. I thought I would try a product called Method. There products are not tested on animals, the bottles they use are made from old bottles and their Nontoxic cleaners are also biodegradable. I am trying out the Method multi-surface spray in French lavender and the Method lemon mint hand wash. My kitchen and bathroom are usually…
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It Kills Germs For Up To 6 Hours. Can It Wipe Out Ebola?
It Kills Germs For Up To 6 Hours. Can It Wipe Out Ebola?
by Emily Sohn
Clean hands go a long way toward preventing the spread of many illnesses, including Ebola. But finding the right hand-wash to impede deadly germs is tricky.
A squirt of alcohol-based sanitizer like Purell kills or denatures many microbes on contact. In the case of bacteria, essentially poking holes in their cell membranes, causing them to shrivel up like water balloons. For…
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It Kills Germs For Up To 6 Hours. Can It Wipe Out Ebola?
It Kills Germs For Up To 6 Hours. Can It Wipe Out Ebola?
by Emily Sohn
Clean hands go a long way toward preventing the spread of many illnesses, including Ebola. But finding the right hand-wash to impede deadly germs is tricky.
A squirt of alcohol-based sanitizer like Purell kills or denatures many microbes on contact. In the case of bacteria, essentially poking holes in their cell membranes, causing them to shrivel up like water balloons. For…
View On WordPress
The Laundry Diaries
These brown speckles that cover my already off-white t-shirt. From that day I decided to wear a white t-shirt for our game drive through the Ngorongoro Crater, it hadn’t rained there in a month and the dust was flying. The same shirt I had worn to pick up my first group of students, and promptly spilled food on before getting to the airport therefore giving them a more accurate idea of what they were getting into. The same shirt I had worn on a date in the Serengeti when we had gotten stuck in the thick clinging mud that claims so many land cruisers. Between digging out the wheels and gunning the engine sending sprays of dirt all over both us, this shirt had become polka-dotted. Why did I bring anything white to East Africa again?
That yellowish stain…where did that come from, oh right, the passion fruit eating debacle. There’s no way to eat these fruits in a civilized graceful way. You pick your way into it with your thumbs, rip it apart so juice sprays everywhere, then you shove a piece into your mouth- skin hanging out so as to avoid the dirt of this fruit that there was no need to wash. Juice drips out of the corners of your mouth and if you’re not very careful, seeds will follow. It’s a fine art of sucking and tonguing the innards of this fruit until you have picked it clean. A Brit we introduce this method to compared the experience to “snogging” to which I replied “possibly you need some more practice.”
The dark brown water left from my zipper pants soaking for minutes- it had been three countries and two weeks since their last scrub. And before you make fun, zipper pants are in the top five best things I brought with me on this trip. They hid my money belt perfectly on the long travel days. When paired with my hiking boots they actually made me look a little more intimidating- as intimidating as a blonde blue eyed 5’4 woman can look. On these pants was sand from the banks of the Nile- when I had no other clothes to wear after pitching through the river for a day. There were scratches from our walk with the rhinos- that day I probably should have attached the bottom halves. Only four days and countless bus and motorbike rides later these pants, tucked into my socks to avoid safari ants crawling up them and “tickling” my legs, had bushwhacked their way through a Western Ugandan forest in an attempt to follow the chimps that were swinging in the trees above us. And then three days later they were carrying me through an even thicker forest this time with the goal of finding a family of gorillas. These pants experienced the culture shock of arriving in Rwanda to find that people drive on the right side of the road. And then they sat on four separate motorbikes as we drove through a Kigali monsoon to try to find a hotel that met our high standards of cheap, central, and accepting of our high levels of noise and chaos. i.e. not a monastery. How many beers had been spilled on these pants? Or hands wiped on these pants that had been covered in grease from eating meat-on-a-stick shoved through our bus window? A little extra scrubbing, rinsing, and a lot of imagination, and these pants were clean again. But maybe traveling with only one pair of pants requires you to do laundry a little more frequently…
The sand tucked into the mesh of my shorts- from the day we drove out to a sleepy fishing village in the middle of nowhere in the Kenyan coast. That sand that had collected on us as we lay on the beach next to the Pacific at noon- the hour that most pale white people should be laying on a beach right beneath the Equator. The sand that we had tried to rinse out in the ocean only to be picked up and slammed back into the shore by the surprisingly strong waves that had rushed in while we had been crisping. The sand that we had again tried to wash off by jumping off a cliff into a nearby tributary because all the village kids were doing it. The sand that even a week later is still sitting my hair, but at least it’s out of my shorts.
And so every laundry day I sit down to my bucket filled with dirt, clothes, and handfuls of soap. Every article I pick up I have to remember where the stain is on this one. And every stain tells a story, usually ones that I can’t believe I could have temporarily forgotten. And maybe I do try as hard as I can to remove these stains, because after eight months of doing my laundry by hand I should be able to get my whites white again. Or maybe I go easy on them on purpose.