A Liklik Haus Story

It's said that missionaries have a relentless thing about bathroom stories. That and weird foods. And it's probably because bathroom stories are the most traumatic stories of all.  

But this is a bathroom story.

And it has to do with things that would lead someone to need to use the facilities.

As hilarious as this story is, if you don't want to read about that, by all means! Skip this article!

Just please don't be offended if this article mentions some things that aren't the most ladylike to be discussing in a public setting. I'm a missionary now and missionaries have a slew of bathroom stories.

This was our second overnight stay with our local wasfamili*. We had gone to bed about an hour before and I woke needing to use the liklik haus (the outhouse). But tired, and not particularly eager to get out of bed, I decided to ignore this feeling as long as I could. 

Well, not much time had passed when James woke up screaming and wouldn't settle back down. It's always hard to get him to nurse in such a new setting so I figured I had better try again. But first the restroom. So I had Jacob go to grab the screaming baby as I went out to the liklik haus. But the front door was locked.

Now as a safety precaution, locks here need a key on both sides. Too often screenwire is a main building material of a door or the window/wall right next to it, making it too easy for someone to cut through the screen and turn the lock from the inside.

But the door was locked. And apparently our wasfamili had gone visiting.

The baby is screaming. Jacob is exasperated, both by the baby and his inability to solve this problem. And my bladder is about to explode.

So I do the only think I can think to do. I take the small peanut butter jar we had reused to bring them milk powder for our evening tea, pour the rest of the powder into a milk powder jar she already had. And left Jacob and James in the living room while I returned to the bedroom.

Guys, the jar was nearly too small.

The second I had capped that lid and thrown the whole jar into the wetbag we brought for dirty diapers, our wasfamili walked up the stairs and unlocked the door.

Jacob gave James to me to nurse and went out to use the liklik haus.

We threw the whole jar in the liklik haus later. I deemed it unclean and would not want to reuse it again.

When we lay in bed, with the baby finally asleep and all bladders empty, Jacob let out a sigh. 

"What's wrong?"

"This is rough."

"Why?"

"Because the baby's crying! And you had to urinate in a jar!"

I laughed. "But it's over now! James is asleep. The deed is done. There's no reason to continue to be upset about what's done. It's probably never going to happen again."

I think we have a choice in this life. We can harp on things done and past and let them ruin our moods and our next moments or we can accept that not every moment in this life isn't perfect and move on. Focus on the good things instead and that will come out in your attitude and life. **

"... whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable - if anything is excellent or praiseworthy - think about such things." Phil 4:8 NIV  

*a wasfamili, literally "watch family", is the non-biological family who looks out for us. In the village, all interactions are done with a strong emphasis on "how are you related to me?" Consequently, throwing people who are related to no one is very perplexing for the village. To overcome this, we'll be "adopted" into a family. During our time at POC, we had a wasfamili who we "practiced interacting with". In our POC village living, we'll have another wasfamili who will take care of us for that month. When we allocate to the village we will be working long-term, we will likewise have a wasfamili there.

**This is not to shame Jacob as his true source of anxiety was that I was upset (or he thought I was). He's such a good husband to be bothered that I'm bothered and try to empathize with me if he can't fix it. 

Leaving for the Village

On Wednesday, we'll be leaving for the village living portion of the Pacific Orientation Course. This is the practical.

Over the past two months, we've been having lessons in Tok Pisin, the trade language here. We've been interacting with the nationals more and more. We've been learning and practicing cooking, both over an open fire and with local ingredients. And now it's time to prove that we weren't just day dreaming all day long.

So we bought food for a month. (Or what we thought was food for a month… How much rice do you eat a month? Do you know? Or do you, like us, just go to the store and buy more whenever you run out? Toilet paper? Sugar? Add a complete change in diet because none of your normal fallbacks are going to fly without a refrigerator and you might understand our confusion.) We bought basic household needs:  a bed, a bucket for hauling water, wash basins for dishes and laundry, mosquito nets, tarps for collecting rain water, etc.

We've spent the past week dividing and packing everything we own into what stays at POC and what goes to the village. (My sewing machine, our laptops, most of our clothes, etc can stay behind for such a short trip without electricity anyway.) (We do have a solar powered cell phone charger.)

We're so excited to head out.

There were some concerns. But we proceeded on the child like faith that we pretty much live our lives on.

With the same confidence that we had when we left the States underfunded, we are eager to leave for the village where, just a week ago, the house we're to stay in was a questionable state, an outhouse had not been prepared, and no idea what to plan for food for a month.

But Thursday we were told that if our waspapa (the man who will act as our father in the village) takes the time to buckle down and get the house up to snuff, he's going to be a great waspapa. And if he doesn't, there's a fallback village that has a solid reputation.

On Friday, we were told that the house is looking good. There were a ton of people actively working on it when they pulled up to see how it was coming!

And we brought 20 kilos of rice so I would be really impressed if we did manage to go hungry!  

So both of my worries that I decided would accomplish nothing by me worrying about and that God would sort out one way or another seem to have been sorted out!

So we have a few odds and ends that still need to find their way into boxes. At this point, we've fallen into the Oops Box phase. (Ordinarily, I would link back to my post about How to Pack Like a Rock Star, where I talk about the Oops Bag, but I pay per mb for internet here, so if you're really interested, I posted it approximately June 2014.) But we have two days (with the nursery open!) to finish up before we're off!

I have no idea what the data service will be like at our allocation. Even here on this mountain with 3 bars and just under 3G internet, posting pictures is a feat.
But I'll be back in town on December 1st! Completely done with POC! And hopefully I will have a good flow of blog articles to regale you of our time spent there and here at POC.  

Life at POC at 5am

It's 5am and I'm wide awake. If I were in my own place, I would just get up and start going about the tasks of the day. Today, we're going to town for a massive shopping trip and buying everything we think we'll need for the month of village living, trying not to err on the side of not enough and going hungry (or being stressed by eating PNG cuisine all the time) and trying not to err on the side of excess and perpetuate the mentality that white people have endless access to tons and tons of unnecessary cargo.

I need to prepare a diaper bag for James (between diarrhea and diaper rash, that kid has been going through a lot of diapers!). I need to double check my shopping list and empty out my bag so I can put in my wallet, my cell phone, and have room for some purchases. I also wouldn't be opposed to a cup of coffee.

But alas, I'm not in my own place. I'm in a room where James sleeps three feet from our bed and all our stuff is "neatly" stacked inside. Luckily, a POC veteran advised us to bring shoe organizers to have places to put some things and that's helped a bit. But when the schedule is as jam packed as it is, we only really use our room to sleep and collect/drop off our belongings. As in, we grab our clothes off the line, drop the basket (which is also the hamper) on the floor and run to our next class. So, the next time we have dirty clothes, they go on the floor until we finally get around to folding.

The walls (too smooth to be plywood, but I'm nearly positive it's not dry wall, maybe just sheets of woods?) are so thin, I can see light from our neighbors room coming through nail holes. Needless to say, the function of the walls is more for visual privacy than keeping sound or (*ahem*) smells in their proper place.

I could sit in the courtyard. The doors to all 13 units opens into it. There's a concrete cistern that pokes it's head out of the earth enough to find a seat on it, though it's not very comfortable. And at 5am, I wouldn't have to worry about the sun burning me, though the mosquitos would probably eat me alive.

If it were the weekend, I would good to my hauskuk (the structure we made as a "house" for our cooking) and hope there was enough kindling cut that I could start a fire without splitting firewood, always an unwelcome sound at 5 am. But not only is it not the weekend, hauskuk weekend's are over. The entire structure was torn down yesterday and the next time we cook for ourselves it will be in the village.

Instead, I'm waiting for my family to awaken. (Oops! They just did. Maybe I'll be able to write another post before we leave for the village. Though I hope I painted a nice picture of life here in my 5 am plight. Though, it's 6 now!)