It was Only One Night

It seems that every time I’m with Naomi Rowe for any extended period of time, my life is bound to be exciting.

This past weekend the Rowe parents (another missionary family in Wau) had to go to Lae, which gave me an opportunity to “babysit” (though the kids are 12 and up, so it hardly felt like babysitting :).

Naomi (16) and I were busy preparing dinner- tuna cakes- (who knew those would be great! I am adding those to my menu at home!), when it started to rain. Hard. (YES!!!! And there was great rejoicing and praising the Lord!). Then Naomi noticed that the water that should be gushing from the gutter into the rain tank in front of the window was gushing out of the rain tank instead! The filter (a mesh basket over the hole on top of the tank) was clogged.

“I’ll go unclog it!” says Naomi as she goes to the door. “Oh, but we have to use the stool to stand on to reach the top, and it’s wobbly so you’ll have to hold it.” (rain, wobbly stool, and my oh-so-coordinated hands to save her from falling…Great…I can just see myself explaining to the parents how she broke her arm or…head the one night they were gone)

We get the stool, but it has a permanently attached cushion. Naomi runs to get a plastic bag to cover it (and the safety factor goes down yet another notch…). After 2 attempts at finding a large enough bag to cover the seat, we find ourselves outside, in the rain, fighting with the filter. Naomi it turns out is not quite tall enough—a fact I was not aware of on the onset of this operation—so she proceeds to try to clean it out with her hands, which was working sort of but taking forever (on the wobbly stool in the rain), so I volunteer to get the filter out.

Even better. I have no idea what I’m doing, the basket is over my head (though I can thankfully reach it), and the only thing saving me from tumbling from the slippery plastic bag and splatting on the concrete below is Naomi. The thought that Naomi and I really haven’t known each other very long and maybe putting my life in her hands is not the best idea right now occurred to me, but the water must be saved!

So I reach up there and work the basket out of its hole, which in the process works the down spout that is pouring an amazing amount of water out of it over to the side as well, and one, two—it’s pouring down my shirt and skirt, and poor Naomi instead. So much for saving the water.

I wrench the pipe back into the hole of the tank—no more waterfall effect—and try to dump the gunk out. It’s stuck, plus I probably shouldn’t be dumping in on the concrete anyway (just in case I do do a face plant on it, at least it can be gunk-free :), so Naomi leaves her post and dumps it out in the grass. When she returned, I then had to return the basket to the hole…more moving the pipe, more buckets of water all over us, and the filter is in place! Water is running freely into the tank! Success!

We run back into the house (though I don’t know why, there wasn’t much left that was dry, at least on the front), and continue fixing dinner (I did wring out my shirt as much as possible first). Alas, I did NOT bring extra clothes (it’s been dry for months! I hadn’t planned on playing in the rain lol), so it ended up being a t-shirt at dinner with her grandparents, but at least I wasn’t dripping…too much.

Then as we’re returning from her grandparents, Naomi mentions that we could save water and wash our hair from the gutters that were overflowing. “Good idea,” I agree! So we grab the shampoo and head out to the workshop where the gutters are dripping. “The best one’s back here,” she tells me. Little do I know that means “back here past this obstacle course of slightly dangerous objects from the workshop in the dark,” or I would have been satisfied with the trickle from the gutter I saw before me. So she takes me back there, “around this tank,” “over this board,” “Oh, actually there’s two boards there,” “There’s a piece of metal sticking up here,” as she lifts her leg way up over this thing that my poor unadjusted-to-the-dark eyes could not distinguish at all! I felt like I was on some imaginary trip; the only way I knew the objects were real is because my bare toes found a couple of them! “Then you step down off the concrete,” “Around this water tank, oh and watch your head there’s this board [actually I really didn’t catch just what it was hanging down there, but I could tell it was something, and I definitely didn’t want to poke any eyes out on it—visibility was already a problem]” Then she gets around this second tank and is like, “Oh, it’s not overflowing here, I guess we’ll have to go back.” What???

“Oh, ok. No big deal. Now that I’ve run the gauntlet once, what’s one more time? In reverse and it’s still raining…” I couldn’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it all; thankfully I did make it back to the first gutter with only slightly stubbed toes.

So we wash our hair in the ice water (So thankful that there was another option for showering!), we’re almost done, and then I hear talking. I look up from under my bedraggled locks, in my drenched clothes, and see 2 children, one of which is a school student of mine, walking by. Lovely.

Someone once said the first thing a missionary leaves behind in America is your pride. If I didn’t believe it before, I do now.

After the hair-washing experience, we went back inside and spent the rest of the evening rather quietly, with much needed showers, baking cinnamon rolls, and a couple games of Operation (where I again had an opportunity to forget my pride as I lost both times horribly).

All in all it was a wonderful time, but I think that perhaps it was a good thing that I was only at the Rowes for one night, who KNOWS what might have happened if I had stayed over again!