Well, Well, Well

Those who pay monthly water bills will appreciate our monthly water bill over here: $0. When we built a house in the village, we were able to hook up a pipeline to the government well and have reliable water.

Welllll, most of the time.

You get what you pay for. After our third daughter was born, we got a water tank, because by then, the water was only on at night. Then it trickled down to nothing. After speaking with municipal workers "busy" playing solitaire on their computers who laughingly promised to come fix the government's pump in our area, but still having NO water three weeks later, last week we finally purchased a well!

Going without something really increases your gratitude when you get that thing back again! We are so thankful for our new well. It was like having a field trip in our own backyard to see the big trucks come in to drill the well. We had a light school day so the kids could follow the process. Would you like to see?

Carson was a little frightened by the big drill for the well. He's hiding out here in the garage--able to see the action from a safe distance while still enjoying a snack.

First, the owner of the company walks around holding a V-shaped tree branch in both hands in a particular manner pointing in front of his chest. When there is water underground, the V amazingly points downward of its own accord! Thankfully, they found water right under our driveway so that we didn't have to cut our fence to allow the truck into the corner of our yard.

This truck has the drill on the back. We barely fit the truck into our driveway and had to remove our beautiful honeysuckle-lined arch (without a new drill my husband had just bought to put up a security door against our neighbor thief, who just stole the drill two days before--isn't that ironic?)

The hose going over to the right is connected to a second truck, which hosts the compressor (the power source) for the drill.

When the drill begins, the engine of the compressor roars, and black smoke fills the sky.

A shovel near the drill catches some dirt that they measure out onto our driveway in piles representing one meter further down each. The rest of the dirt is scooped into a wall to direct the water down the road for when we hit water. It's neat to note the difference in soil colors for each meter further down.

I had Caleb draw different kinds of soil for his nature journal. Each pile represents one more meter drilled for our well.

Water at 21 meters!

The soil got wetter around 20 meters, and then we hit water! That is excellent! It should have saved us money, since you pay based on how many meters are drilled; but the company owner suggests that all customers go down to at least 60 meters. We went down to 55.
Then they put in the "casing." This doesn't go the full 55 meters down, only about 35. Inside that goes the pipeline and the pump to pump the water up to our tank. From that an electrical line is run into the house, mounted in a box on the wall, and attached to a plug. Whenever we switch on the plug, water fills our tank. We had a manhole cover made to cover the top of the well.

55 piles of dirt show 55 meters down.

After they found water, water was constantly running down our yard into the road for the rest of the day. The boys made a dam, as well as "bricks" with the slag and rock unearthed from beneath our driveway.

I was surprised that well water isn't necessarily clean. After getting the well, we've still struggled with water so dirty that I felt I couldn't cook with it and would be embarrassed for people to think that our dishwater or toilets are always that dirty. We're still figuring out why the water is dirty: perhaps the casing wasn't welded properly, or perhaps we will have to pump water for a while before everything settles and becomes clean. Well anyway, we are so grateful to God for our well!

The high drill could be seen from afar and was the main attraction once the village kids got out of school.

Border-Hopping with the Boers

"Don't let your kids walk alone down to the river behind the house. There might be crocodiles." I laughed inwardly at how strange it was to hear such a statement. It reminded me of South Africa's incredible diversity. Cities host huge malls selling iPads and iPhones, but rural areas host rivers with crocodiles.

Boer is Afrikaans for "farmer." Many of the Dutch settlers in South Africa were farmers, and many Boers still farm around the country. With some, it's more of a hobby than their main occupation, as in the case of our friends, whose farm we recently visited for a day.

A chameleon!

Another difference between Boer and American farms is that the Afrikaners just say "farm" to mean either a "game farm" or an agricultural farm. When I picture a farm, I picture cultivated fields growing green stuff, with a barn and some cows, etc. But many farms here look like completely untouched land. That's because they are game farms, or perhaps what we would call a ranch. Our friends had a game farm.

I thought their farm was near to Louis Trichardt, the closest town to our village (a half hour away). Actually their farm bordered Zimbabwe! We drove to Musina, the border town, and then drove east for another hour, an almost 3-hour drive in total.

Grilling wors in the outdoors.

After a dinner of "boerewors" (farmer's sausage), salad, and "crisps" (chips), the two older boys got to go on a "night drive" with their dad and the farmer, while I stayed back with the littles. Afrikaners make amazing salads. You might think a salad usually has a lettuce base; but a salad here can mean any vegetable combination with some sort of dressing (and that's usually straight flavored vinegar, not some fancy concoction). In the past I would have turned my nose up at a salad with cooked peas, corn, and tiny tomatoes in a grape vinegar dressing; but I have learned that Afrikaners have a magic touch when it comes to salads. No matter how unthinkable the combination might be to you, just trust that it'll be good.

I later read the label on the vinegar bottle. It read, "Great for salads, pickling, and marinades." Unfortunately, it performed the middle description on my stomach. My stomach felt pickled all night. I finally drifted off to sleep in an air-conditioned room. (Back home "across the mountain," I'd been cuddling up under thick blankets to stave off the approaching winter cold.) Here near the border it was noticeably warmer.

The biggest millipede I've ever seen.

The following morning we ate a stout, homemade Boer breakfast and took a drive around the farm with our hosts. Their farm borders two major rivers in our province, the Nzhelele (which they confidently mispronounced with no pretensions at trying to pronounce it the African way--another humorous mark of the stereotypical Afrikaner--not so PC) and the Limpopo River, which our province is named for, and which delineates the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe and between South Africa and Mozambique.

"We're going to the dam first," they informed us. I'm picturing a governmentally-built affair and was shocked to hear that they built it! We affectionately coined an acronym for this Boer spirit--ACF: Afrikaner Confidence Factor. They have such a can-do "Make-a-Plan" (a common phrase) spirit that they will often give you tidbits of dogmatic advice or information that leave your head whirling with incredulity.

So we put our own protective filter on their unscreened confidence--the ACF. If they had told me on my hypothetical farm to just build my own dam, I would have laughed it off as extraordinary overconfidence. Yeah, right! Like you could build your own dam. But I saw it with my own eyes. And my son fell in it with his own feet. *glare* We were amazed and pleased to know such resourceful, able people. And if you express amazement, they will act like it's nothing. "It took about 1,000 bags of cement," they inform us.

The homemade dam. Colin is already wearing his jacket after his trip-and-drip. He didn't fall off the dam wall, but down by the pipes.

We also visited the little "houseboat" they built themselves. They are used to swimming in that river. Although crocs can be a danger, they weren't plentiful in the Nzhelele; until some months ago a crocodile farm upstream flooded due to lots of rain this year. About 5,000 crocs just swam right out of their farm and now inhabit the rivers. The farm only recovered some hundreds of them.

Our friend took his rifle everywhere with him. He hoped to shoot a buck for meat to sell (they tell me they don't shoot the females here), as well as a large crocodile the workers had sighted several times sunning itself in front of a water pump. We didn't see any crocs, but I had trouble sleeping Tuesday night because of my imagination running away with me. Most of you know we have our own crocodile history with our teammate being attacked several years ago.

The homemade dam allows more water for their game; they had several varieties of deer--impala, nyala, kudu, eland--and giraffe. When the giraffe gets old (about 15 years old), it loses its teeth. When all the teeth are gone, it starves to death. So before that happens, the Boers, for about $1,500, give the pleasure of shooting game and having a stuffed giraffe's head on his study wall to a foreign hunter. This is the kind of elite hunting common in Europe. Americans should be thankful for their sportsmen culture and freedom to hunt, as we discovered recently when watching this documentary (free online for a limited time).

As we drove around the farm, I asked the Mrs. why her husband had mentioned the night before needing to make their presence known on the farm. She told me of two more real dangers than crocs that they regularly face.

• Poachers: the farm has many acres and little surveillance. When they tried to set up a camera to see what was happening, it was stolen. Poachers come in and kill the deer. Sometimes they find the animals tied with a wire around its neck to a tree, choked to death. Sometimes there is no sign. Animals are simply missing, decreasing in number.
• Smugglers: "Drugs?" I asked. Yes, drugs, but it's usually cigarettes, which are highly taxed here. If they can smuggle them across the border, the taxes are avoided; and they can get way more profit. Once they saw four vehicles full of men cutting across their property which they knew were either the poachers or smugglers, but they were only two people with one rifle between them, and so didn't attempt to stop them.

I knew how many Zimbabweans had fled into South Africa in the past decade because of their dictatorial, mad president who impoverished Zimbabwe, making it the third poorest country in the world at the time, and how many were in our village a few hours away. I wondered if they had seen several crossing through their land. They confirmed that there were many. Even their current workers sneaked across the border a few years ago, fording the crocodile-infested rivers with their few belongings on their heads and coming through the easily accessed fences on their farm.

"Wasn't there a border patrol?" I wondered. They chuckled. No. There were occasional police watching the borders; but they can't be everywhere, and worse than that, they are so corrupt that they let anyone go with a bribe. The border patrol is no help to the Boers with Zimbabweans crossing the farm illegally, whether poachers, smugglers, or refugees.

This we did next ourselves! We had traversed the farm, noticing game (our friend tried to hunt a few, but didn't get any good shots), huge yellow and black spiders hanging in webs across the dirt-track road, and losing my son's shirt which Seth had placed on top of the truck to dry from his earlier accidental dip in the dam, finally arriving at the Limpopo River which forms the other border to their farm. We turned onto a track that followed the border fence.

Border-hopping.

There was a small strip of "no-man's land" between South Africa's mesh wire fence and Zimbabwe's. The Limpopo was just beyond the Zimbabwean fence. At first the border fence was a decent fence with barbed wire on top; but it quickly deteriorated as we drove, until we came to a place with no fence at all. Two gates, one in each country's fence, were both open with no pretense at all at keeping anything from passing between one and the other. This is where many people border-hop without needing the proper papers. We ourselves walked right through and visited the Limpopo River.

It was deserted, but our friend told us that on the weekends it is full of people fishing and...border-hopping. It was beautiful and a little bit thrilling to be able to visit such a historic landmark without needing to go through the happiness-destroying process of having passports stamped. We skipped rocks for a bit, snapped a picture, and headed back to the farm.

Limpopo River

Don't mess with Mom!

The evidence!

On the way back to the farmhouse, Seth got the chance to shoot the rifle at an empty water bottle. He hit it several times. They asked if I wanted a turn. I'd only ever shot at a Christian camp once or twice. The rifle had scopes on the top, but it was a heavy piece of work. I accidentally touched the tip, still hot from Seth's firing. They threw another water bottle closer than Seth's had been. It took me a bit to focus through the scopes, but the scopes and cross-hairs made it easy to sight the target. I shot twice and made two holes in my bottle! They said I could be a sniper, but I demurred that if the target were moving, that would make a difference. :)

Swinging on vines.

There are several disadvantages to being a missionary kid, Seth and I discussed on the way home, but there are certain pleasing advantages as well. I was glad for the children to see normal use of a firearm, the great rivers of our area, wild game, and gain a broader international knowledge of how our world works today, with some of the interesting challenges to running a farm on the border of South Africa and Zimbabwe.

The Many Jobs of a Missionary ~ Septic Tank Builder?

OK, this one has a funny side to its madness.

Mixing cement by hand.

When we built our house in the village, we also had to build a septic tank. Most of the villagers have an outhouse, but we wanted indoor plumbing. You know, the benefits of being able to have indoor relief, then use one finger to flush away the filth from your house, are just soooo many.

We googled how to do it. That in itself is kinda funny.

We didn't count on termites eating the oil-treated poles that held up the lid to the septic tank. Well, what were we thinking??

Seven years and some heavy rainy seasons later, the grass over one section of the septic tank was noticeably sagging. We were worried about our kids and the village kids who always play here. We knew we would have to do something to reinforce the lid.

The Monday before Thanksgiving, Seth started removing sod and digging around the edge of the septic tank to fix the lid. He got some of the corrugated iron that was the lid away, and then...augh! Inevitable slide of concrete and zinc, and most of the lid fell into the morass of filthy water beneath!

Hundreds of pounds of cement and zinc just fell in there, and now how to get it out? Seth got some of it out through an ingenious, quick-thinking rescue as it was falling; but the majority will stay beneath the ground for infinity.

Cockroaches. Everywhere. These aren't the wimpy American kind, either; they're as big as your thumb. Thankfully, we had two bottles of cockroach killer in the house. Several escaped, but so far they haven't shown themselves in the house beyond their relatives already there. Like I would know the difference, right?

I kept the kids in the house all day. Thankfully, two church members helped Seth individually throughout the day. There was one period when he had no one with him, and I went out to make sure he didn't fall in. Obviously, a septic tank is what it is, but I was surprised that it really didn't stink. The amount of "gray water" in there from baths, etc., really diffused a lot of my imagined horrors.

Seth used lintels (concrete steel-reinforced beams used in building over doorways and windows on cement houses) this time as the basis of the lid, with two layers of corrugated iron on top of that, then a layer of poured cement, and finally replacing the sod when the cement dried.


We contemplated digging another one, but after some inspection, we think this one is big enough, even having some space taken up with the former lid :), for another few years. Either way, it had to be covered.

Caleb was so intent on helping! I let him help with the cement layer after the tank was covered.

I'd had nightmares of the kids falling in, or Seth getting hurt or sick while working on it. No one fell in, praise the Lord!

That is, until the next day, when the first church member who had helped came by to see the new lid, and stepped on the only weak, yet unfinished part--a small square hole opening (to get in later if we can ever find a company here that pumps out septic tanks), with a poured cement lid. His foot went right through lid and he fell in up to his hip--one leg in, one leg out! Poor guy! He was in the water up to his calf. Somehow he managed to keep his sandal on! He got pretty scraped up on that leg from the steel that reinforced that particular small lid. So we'll have to redo that now. :/ He's better now, but we sure felt sorry about it! He got through the former morning with no accident, only to fall in when it was safest!

You can see the size of the small lid in this picture pretty well. The zinc had been cut away.

I got a tickle on Thanksgiving Day out of hearing Seth recount to his dad and then brother, both professional plumbers and builders--geniuses in technical matters!--of the lid-falling-in, and hearing their surprised and somewhat stumped, "Oh! Oh my!" Yeah. Wow.

Live and learn! We've learned so much about building by being missionaries! Did you ever think? How many Americans have ever had to build their own septic tank?

How Do You Clean Your Food?

Recently I asked the question of what some of my missionary women friends would teach a visiting missionary on their survey trip. A few mentioned food safety (sterilizing and safely preparing food). I thought it would be interesting to see the different precautions and preparations we all do to keep our family safe and healthy. So here was the question:

What do you do to prepare/clean meats, veggies, and fruits? Be detailed in your methods. Please also let us know where your are serving... I would love to see how much of a difference that makes.

And here are the responses I received:

Striking Out

Economics touches our lives directly in so many ways. Missionaries often need to stretch themselves to consider ideas they didn't think came with the job. Questions of colonialism, capitalism, the reasons for poverty, and ways to escape poverty are often viewed through our biblical lens (or not thought about!), but nationals see things differently.

South Africa is a strike-crazy country. Since we arrived, we have witnessed several different strikes, from workers at a grocery store, to municipal workers spreading trash all over the nearest town instead of collecting it, to teachers' and miners' strikes. Last year, strikes by miners became so incendiary that more than 30 miners were killed in the riots.

On one occasion at the nearest government university, students "striked," or rather rioted, to raise their bursaries (scholarships) above 70% of their university costs. They weren't getting enough financial help from their scholarships, apparently. The school offered scholarships to 90%, but the student leadership said that still wasn't enough. Students defaced buildings, vandalized rooms, and even burned a building. Eventually they got what they were asking.

This past week, impersonal strikes became personal when the municipal workers of South Africa went on strike. The workers for the water system in our region, rather than simply quitting work, turned off the lines that supplied water for an entire large region. Several villages--hundreds of thousands of people became dependent on whatever private wells were in the area to supply their water.

Two and a half years ago, we purchased a tank to hold about 2,000 liters of water; but we were still dependent on the government supply lines to fill the tank with water (at least once or twice a week). We did not hear the cause of the lack of water until halfway through the week and had not been conserving water the way we would have had we known. We immediately stopped any washing of laundry and began our old measures of conserving water.

Thankfully, our teammates 8 kilometers away have a private well, and they allowed us to wash some laundry there and tote jugs and containers of water back home. Also thankfully, the water came back on last night (Sunday)! The story goes that "a gang of boys" went around and turned on all the supply lines, but the strike is not yet over. So the water may yet be turned off again.

Meanwhile, while the water was on, I washed seven loads of laundry! Even though it was rainy, I washed clothes as quickly as the machine would run, and crossed the bridge of where to hang them to dry afterwards.

Clothes hung in the garage. I also hung sheets over the curtain rods in the living room!

More laundry hung on hangars in the bathroom.

It was a stressful situation. All week I would think of how to conserve water, when I could find a block of time to run over to my teammate's house to wash clothes, which clothes should be washed first if I were limited, and which could wait. My toilet-training daughter would have an accident, and my patience would snap much more quickly than it would have had we had easy water access to clean with. My highchair-eating toddler threw his plate of food on the floor, and my temper went through the roof. The biggest source of stress was that no one knows how long the strike will last or when the water will be off or on.

It was a good exercise for me in trust in God's sovereignty, patience during temptation, and cheerfulness while strained. It was also a good exercise yet again in thinking through the moral connections of economics.

The strikers "struck out" in the following three ways:

1. The workers displayed a spirit of entitlement in striking in the first place. Don't they realize that they and everyone else will soon be paying for it as well, as prices go up all over the place to compensate for their raised wages? Do they not see that if wages go up for them, the unemployment rate will not decrease? Who can hire more workers if each worker is paid more?

A spirit of entitlement is all over--not just here in strike-crazy Africa. It's also in America and the lack of personal responsibility; it's in Greece and all the other countries which, while sinking in debt, cannot raise the age of retirement benefits to 65 instead of 62 or whatever the ages in debate are. A Christian worldview encourages hard work and personal responsibility.

2. Further, the municipal strikers displayed selfishness in going beyond a simple strike to deprivation of life's most basic necessity for thousands of people. Rather than handling their fight themselves, they're hoping to cause a riot or riots from the common people so that their benefits or wages increase. A Christian worldview encourages compassion towards others and placing others before self.

3. Finally, this strike and the numerous other strikes in Africa display a common impatience and get-rich-quick spirit. Rather than accumulating wealth the way most other wealthy people did--through generations of hard work, good management, and frugality; they want it now.

That's why the prosperity gospel is the most popular religion over here. I want it now! I deserve it now! Why should you have something I can't have? Jesus gives you that? I'll take Him then! A Christian worldview encourages putting our treasure in heaven, not on earth. It discourages the love of money, and at the same time encourages the work ethic that produces wealth.

Once again, Seth and I have had a vivid illustration of how much Christianity could change the world. The problem is sin. The solution is the Living Water.

 

Okay, your turn! Got any water stories for me? What's your water situation? Any tips on how you conserve water or where you hang your laundry during rainy days? 

Rescuing My Happy Place... a.k.a. Candle Repair 101

We live in a big, pollution-filled, stinky, garbage-filled city. The scents that we have to endure sometimes could be considered a brutal form of torture. Cruel and unusual punishment.

(Apple Pumpkin and Harvest scents from Yankee Candle. YUM!)

Scented candles. They bring such joy to this home. Lighting one of my candles is like getting a breath of fresh air. Whether it be Apple Pumpkin that whisks us away to Fall in the mountains of Western North Carolina, or Bahama Breeze that almost makes us hear sea gulls and crashing waves on sand, scented candles teleport us to our happy places without even leaving the room.

But nothing quite brings a screeching halt to the trip down Happyville Lane like hearing the crash of a candle to the floor. (Face it. Sometimes a candle is more than just a candle on the field. So every broken candle hurts. They are irreplaceable in many countries... like ours.)

This has happened twice this year, both times from a sweet little boy who sometimes forgets where a good place to play is... and where it is not. Both times, he crumbled into tears. He knows how we all treasure their scents. And we cannot get scented candles here. (Yes, I plan on having a post on Lessons from a Broken Candle. But this post is about the practical instead of the devotional.)

So what did I do?

I put on my Super Mommy cape and glided in for the rescue... candle style.