In this day and age, the poor workers at the St Mary Infirmary have to be washing tons of laundry – bed sheets, clothing etc – by hand. They don’t have a working washing machine.
OK. It’s no easy job working at the infirmary. Any infirmary in Jamaica. The clients or inmates are often old and infirm and cannot take care of themselves or help in their own care and are often incontinent, or unable to regulate their bowel movements. They often are lonely, some are depressed and others yet have mental illnesses or have been abused. It’s a huge task taking care of them.
So you would expect the people doing it to be well paid. They are not. You would hope that every effort would be made for the staff to work in as comfortable conditions or circumstances as possible. This is often not so, at least not so for some of the workers at the St Mary Infirmary in recent weeks.
For weeks now, the workers, two or three to the laundry shift, have had to be doing all the washing by hand, at the St Mary Infirmary. Remember, this includes bed linen as well as clothing of elderly people, some of them incontinent or, putting it raw, having no control over their bowels.
The small industrial washing machine they had broke down months ago and then they were given a domestic machine, one you work in your family for three or even six of you. Not for linen for 100 people. It broke down weeks ago leaving them with no machine and one dryer.
It’s awful to see the workers beating the clothes on an old concrete trough, as people did years ago on stones at the river. And then they move the clothes down, through the trough, washing with hands, wringing out and spreading on the spiderweb of lines at the back of the place.
Funny, no one there wanted to talk about it just that it would soon be fixed. That was the end of December. Up to when we checked last week Thursday, a machine had not arrived.
SHAME! SHAME! THREE TIMES SHAME
