Love & Hope Children’s Home occupies a four-story house in Los Planes de Renderos, El Salvador. As you can imagine, it is a group effort to keep our house clean. The children all have one or two daily limpiezas (chores) and the caregivers chip-in for the spaces left over.
Many of the floors are swept and mopped twice a day. In a country with little grass and a lot of dust, brooms and mops are a necessity! Add in white tile floors and 20-plus children who run, play, do homework and eat snacks throughout the house, and you can understand the mess we face everyday. Don’t worry though; chores are always done with a smile (well, most of the time).
Dishes are another issue. Three meals per day for the children, caregivers and missioraries equals a lot of work in the kitchen. The responsibilty is shared between everyone. The adults wash their own dishes and the kids take turns washing the cups and bowls of their counterparts. One group of children is also responsible for serving the others and then cleaning up the kitchen after breakfast and dinner. We have a schedule that rotates the groups meal-to-meal and day-to-day.
Laundry is the last big area that needs constant attention. The older children all wash their clothes by hand in the pila, then make their way to the roof to hang clothing on the line. Sheets, towels, and school uniforms are washed in the machine, and when it is dark or raining outside the dryer is usually occupied. The caregivers are incharge of cleaning the laundry rooms and bathrooms.
Our children, caregivers and missionaries work pretty hard to keep the “Casa Cristal” (the “Crystal House,” Antonio’s nickname for our house) clean. It is a daily fight against dirt and dust, and it might not look like crystal, but we feel blessed to live where we do!