Dryer Balls and India's washer women

I bought a set of those mysterious little dryer balls you see on TV. Two knobby little rubber balls in the dryer are supposed to make your clothes soft without chemicals. Huh?

They do, indeed, make my clothes softer than when they are dried without my little blue buddies. Oddly, they also make the lint trap fuller.

I remember a young Indian woman I worked with a few years ago. She told me they didn't have a washing machine in her well-to-do home in India.

"How do you wash clothes?" I asked. "Oh," she said, "Some people come and take clothes to the river." I had a vision of a river running with suds. That didn't seem right, so I asked, "How do they get them clean?" She laughed. "They beat them with rocks!" I wondered how the clothes turned out. "Soft," she said, then: "Clothes don't last long."

Uh,oh.