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| *lion's head not usually included but one of my fellow missionaries saw someone selling them on the side of the road and bought it, I like it, it reminds me of Europe |
Actually, it's not a machine at all but it's very effective for washing clothes (provided that the person washing the clothes is a capable clothes washer). Here's how it works: As you can see, on the left, the water comes out of the spigot (or in this case the lion's mouth) and is caught in a basin. This is a really handy feature around here because we often don't have running water. The right side of the pila is where you do the washing, so if I were to wash my shirt, I would place it over the washboard, use the little blue bowl to pour water on it (this is really important, you always use something clean to pour water from the left side to the right side, if you dunk your dirty clothes in the basin then you no longer have a clean water supply), next I would lather it up with soap (which conveniently comes in the shape of a cylinder so that you can just roll it over the clothes, and then get to scrubbing. Once I've nicely scrubbed my shirt using the washboard, I dump more clean water over it to rinse out the soap, ring out my shirt and put it outside on the line to (hopefully) dry. I love doing laundry, I find it relaxing and I always listen to music while I'm washing my clothes.
...and my dishwasher...
We also have another pila in the kitchen (without a lion's head), except that instead of a washboard on the right side there is just a drain in the middle like a normal sink. We wash all of our dishes there, if you have to wash all of your dishes by hand it's a lot more effective to dump a bowl of water on them than to try to rinse them off with the little stream of water that comes out of the sink. In fact, when I encounter normal sinks I get really confused and have a slight panic attack- what is this contraption? how do I use it? where is the water basin? I have to turn it on?
It's going to be hard to go back to using a sink... and maybe even a washing machine...
