Laundry Love

If you're wondering why we're talking about Laundry Love and not Bible translation this week, it's because Bible translation is how we love the world still waiting for God to speak their language... and Laundry Love is how we love our neighbors who are waiting to see if God cares about them when society ignores them. 

Laundry and Love to Those in Need
By Connie Bouvier
The “Cheers” song says, “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name
and they're always glad you came.” This is what LaundryLove provides. At the corner of
Beach and Garfield, in a very eclectic strip mall sits a laundromat. If you come by on the second Wednesday of the month, you might notice that a sort of street fair, or maybe more a parking lot fair, has sprung up. An unusual aspect of this fair is that people are carrying laundry, lots of laundry. This event is so anticipated by some that they show up at noon and wait for the official start of the event at 6:00. Their names are Bernice and Victoria, and Mona and John, and Sugar Bear and so many others. Some have been coming to this LaundryLove fair since it began in 2012. You might know some of them too. They are the people who sometimes seem to clutter our city or that we worry about hurting
our kids, or those who make us really uncomfortable when all we want to do is get a bite to eat at a local establishment. They are the people whose names many don’t know. They are the people we sometimes wish would go away. And on a day when we are more inspired by benevolence, they pull at our hearts and we wish we could do something, if only we knew what.

That’s what we felt; those of us who wanted to find a way to help. It hurt our hearts and we wanted to do something, but our funding was small. Someone found an article about LaundryLove. It began up in Ventura about 15 years ago when another group of people were similarly moved so they talked to some of the street people in the area and asked what might be helpful to them. One man said, “Maybe if I had clean clothes, people would treat me like a person.”

Clean clothes. So simple, yet so heartbreakingly elusive. They searched out a laundromat and asked about their slowest night and set about plans to take it over a few hours on that evening once a month. The plan was that people could bring their dirty clothes and then the hosts would provide coins for the machines and soap for the clothes. The idea grew. And in the process, relationships were formed. This is how it began.

This is how we began. Since then, we have expanded our services to include food distribution, a hot meal, and a lot of fellowship. Sometimes someone is without bedding and a sleeping bag appears. Pregnant moms sleeping in crowded cars are helped with housing and motel stays so they have a place to recover once their baby is delivered and, hopefully, find a place to live.

When someone we know doesn’t show up, we look for them, make sure they are ok. We have also assisted other organizations that would join us would often be inspired to start a similar service in their own town and at this point, there are 15 LaundryLoves directly born of our service.

One of the questions we considered early on is how we might determine the financial need of our guests. It was quickly agreed that we did not want to do this. Do people take advantage?
I suppose, but much more, I’ve seen people who want to be a part of things and participate.

People who have been helped by LL return in better times and bring a meal. One older guy came in. He said he’d been living on the streets for 30 years. He said he could tell something was going on here and he wanted to know about it. We told him and he said, “That’s wonderful.” He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a crumpled five-dollar bill and said, “Here. I want to help.”

Sometimes we have problems, arguments between guests, people line cutting (I wouldn’t advise it) and we need to straighten things out. It’s not uncommon to have the person responsible for the dust up to return the next month, hat in hand, apologizing and letting us know that they appreciate what they have and that they’re sorry. Maybe it’s for the free laundry. Maybe it’s for dinner. Or maybe it’s just because it’s a place they feel loved. It doesn’t really matter to us. Because time has passed. We have a relationship. They might be your difficult Aunt Hazel or your irascible Uncle Bob, but we end up falling in love with them over and over again, month after month, smelly socks and whatever else. Because for us, also, it is a place where everyone knows our names and they’re always glad we came.

Check out our website at laundrylovehb.com for more information.

Our friend Josh on his birthday, dressed as Elvis 

*This article was originally published in "HB Coastal Living" and "Seacliff living" with different photos. The photos here are my own. The article was written by our friend and fellow Laundry Lover Connie Bouvier