Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Bucket brigade

Yesterday, I wrote about the bucket brigade our team had to form in order to fill our water tank so we'd have drinking and cooking water.  I also mentioned it was the hardest work day of that summer.  I remember it as one of the hardest work days of my life, but two decades can cloud a memory, so I didn't want to say that for fear it really wasn't as hard as I recalled.  Sort of like when you go visit your elementary school  after graduating and realizing the hallway you thought was enormous was actually pretty average, and the desks you remembered being humongous now have no room for your knees.

So I held my fingers and didn't type what I really meant: that day, walking up and down the hill with one-gallon buckets full of water just about killed me.

But late last night, a fellow teammate, Jennifer, posted pictures of the bucket brigade, and I felt my recollections of the difficulty of the day were correct:


See that lake?  That's were we're coming from.


Doesn't that water look yummy?  We couldn't walk down there at night because hippos lived there.  So we ended up calling our lake water Hippo Juice.  And no amount of sugar and Kool-Aid could mask the lake taste.



That silver cistern is what we filled.  I think that's me in the pink shirt sitting on the edge.  

Good thing our memory verse for that day was Isaiah 40:31: But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. 

Man, I am so, so thankful for my kitchen sink!

3 comments:

  1. Hippo juice-yum! I can only imagine how hard that was at 15 or 35-yikes!!!

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  2. 3 comments in one, here, for your last 3 posts. This is awesome, and the way you got an answer to your rain prayer is even more awesome. I find that i can muddle along without getting a clear answer every time, because when i do get one, i can look back on it and it helps me keep faith that there IS a reason for things even when they don't seem like they have any purpose besides misery.

    I have to ask - on the trip this year, yall were supposed to wear skirts?? WHY? Every picture from your teenage trip - yall for sure didn't have to wear skirts then! What changed to make skirts required?

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  3. MHWTV - it really was yucky water. And I'm fairly certain (read: convinced) I couldn't do it at 40.

    NftP - I love your first point. Like you, I can muddle along without the big picture because I've seen snapshots. This one, though, feels like a great big 8X10 glossy.

    As for the skirts: we could wear the jeans in '87 because we had little to no contact with the locals on our workdays. On Sundays, however, we were required to wear skirts because we went to church with the community.

    Dan, my missionary friend in Nairobi, said he was surprised we weren't required to wear them all the time, though, based on what he now knows about that tribe.

    The other reason we had to wear them this trip was because our first week was spent in a Muslim area where it would be scandalous for a woman to wear pants. Dan's group has made great inroads into that community and missionary women wearing skirts is one way they can honor that culture and win the right to be heard. As much as I dislike wearing skirts, I wouldn't want to do anything to harm their witness, so I put on my big girl panties and the skirt.

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