Tyler and Emily in PNG

We have officially been back in the ‘land of the unexpected’ for two full weeks. It has been a busy 14 days. Last week we were contained in a conference room for a week long annual branch meeting. It was a good meeting which as a group we accomplished much and set forth for another year. We elected three new directorship roles and disbanded a long running committee which has changed focus over the two previous decades.

Since I have been back, I have encountered some home repairs. Though we do not own this house, we are responsible for much if not all of the maintenance work. After been gone for the past 10 months you can guess the repair list. I knew a few of the issues I needed to address such as replacing terminate damaged floor boards, installing new fly wire, and leaking faucets. However there were two unknown projects that needed immediate attention.

Last Saturday I got the ladder out to journey upward to the roof. It was my goal to check on our new gutters that were put in place last March before I left the country. I wanted to check the integrity and see how much gunk has gathered in the gutters. The placing of the ladder was imperative for what was to be seen. As soon as I climbed to roof level, I found a rather disturbing scene. I had a hole in my roof! Luckily, the hole was over the eave and no water had  come inside the house. However, this hole still had to be fixed ASAP as we are in rainy season and who knows how long the hole has been in the roof. End of story, Bob came yesterday and got it all fixed.

The other disturbing scene was seeing water come up from the ground. I knew that was not good! Yes, it has been raining everyday, but that does not mean water should be coming up from the ground. Of course I didn’t have a shovel so I had to buy a new shovel in town the next day. As I started to dig where the water was coming from I found a 3” black pipe. I traced this pipe back to the laundry/garage building and I knew it was discharge or gray water pipe. As I continued to dig to find out where this pipe went, I quickly found that the pipe simply was cut-off and ended right there in the yard. It was no more than 8” below the grass. I again talked to Bob about this problem and he mentioned to me, that many people in PNG discharge their gray water into the yard. This was our case as well. Problem solved but the problem has not been fixed…perhaps I will just cover the pipe back up and let the washer machine empty out into the back yard.

Besides home repair we had another issue with our truck. We had no working air conditioning. I thought that was funny since when I left in March it worked great. So I thought, I guess the freon could have leaked out or expired over the past year while the truck was sitting idle. After all, we did have a rat chew through some mechanical wires in the engine compartment while we were gone so perhaps the same rat got a ‘high’ from a leaking air conditioning unit. Once again, I talked it over with Bob and he had a look at it the next day. As we were diagnosing the problem, Bob spotted a loose wire on the compressor. With a cheap wire nut we were able to join the two wires thus supply power back to the compressor. Ah…the refreshing breeze of cold air in hot, humid Madang is once again welcomed.

So our first two weeks back have not been lacking any excitement. And not to forget, I also fixed the hot water heater by replacing the booster switch with a spring loaded timer switch.

Thanks for your prayers and thoughts as we have been settling back into the swing of life in PNG. Be on the lookout for our February newsletter by next weekend.