Tuesday, November 20, 2007

The Old and the New

I forgot to mention this the other night.  I was at Carrefour’s, the big French Wal-Mart type store near my house, buying groceries.  I needed detergent for my clothes, and as I was walking down the aisle I noticed there were all these bars of soap.  After a second it dawned on me what these were for—so you can wash clothes by hand with a washboard and a bucket.

Which gets back to my point from the other day about poverty in America versus the third world.  I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever seen flocks of American poor washing their clothes by hand, probably because many of these people who literally meet the definition of “poverty” either have their own washing machines or enough money to go to a laundromat.  (It goes without saying that the truly mentally ill among us don’t wash their clothes at all.) In China, however, there are still enough people who wash their clothes by hand that there are twenty different brands and styles of soap dedicated to that purpose.