Hand Washing Clothes in the River. I'm sorry... what?!

Well, I'm not about to paint the prettiest picture of my poor husband, so allow me to get you in an empathetic mood.
Papua New Guinea is... hot. Like once it was 80 degrees, and I put on a jacket.
Papua New Guinea is humid. If you are alive, you are sweating. If you are "cold", you are sweating. Sitting under a fan, reading? Sweating. Olgeta taim! (All of the time.)
Papua New Guinea is dirty. Wet season = muddy. Dry season = dusty. Always.
You cannot get clean in a bucket shower. You may think you can get clean. But wait til you get to a real shower.
And laundry day did not come as frequently as we ran out of clothes....
So Jacob was dirty and gross and sweaty all the time. I mean, so was I but I was cool with it. The nature of the beast. Jacob did not like the beast's nature. He did not like it at all.

So one night, Martha said that she was going to get some village girls to wash the clothes first thing in the morning. Now, I left my clothes at Martha's house. That is wear I bathed. That is where the laundry got done. Why haul it back and forth? Jacob, however, didn't leave his clothes at Martha's.
So I got up and headed over to Martha's in the morning. And the girls had just finished all the laundry. It was now hanging to dry.
Brewed some coffee (in the bush there's this nice pour over system that we got so used to we didn't even notice when the coffee maker in town was broken when we got back. We just did the pour over and people stopped us demanding to know where we got coffee. "...the coffee pot?"), got a cup of granola, and sat to work on my bilum until Jacob got there.
He brought his clothes. Poor dear.
"Um..." Martha said. "They already finished the laundry."
Jacob was in a rage.
Now, if you know Jacob, you might be surprised that he is capable of a "rage". "Elizabeth," you would say, "are you sure this was Jacob? I mean, come on, who's prone to rage?" And you would be so right. No one raises an eyebrow if I start spitting fire but Jacob?
"...Honey," I start cautiously, "...you seem... really upset. What's going on?"
"I just want clean clothes!" he lamented before heading for the bathroom. (Not having one in the bush house made night ... complicated...)
"Should I get the girls to come back....?" Martha whispered to me.
"I don't know..."

I don't know how we got to the topic of me never having washed clothes in a river before but Martha was positively gleeful to send me off with a laundry and a bar of soap.

So there we stood that morning. Me thigh deep in a river and Jacob on shore putzing around. I called to him frequently to make sure he was watching out for crocodiles.

"If I get eaten washing your clothes when you were supposed to be watching for crocodiles, I will haul my crocodile mangled body out of this water to kill you," I assured him.


I did not get eaten. (Obviously.)
The water was fantastic.
Although I'm not sure the clothes got much cleaner....