Grace in the Valley: July 2021

Wednesday 28 July 2021

Life as we know it (snapshots)

Molly loves homemade yogurt

The house under construction nearby

A bouquet of flowers Orcxance picked for me after work one day

Eileen sporting some shades (note the reflection of Molly)

Helping Papa with laundry

Our tiniest turtle

Sunday 25 July 2021

Church

I’d like to use this post to tell you a little about what our church service is like. I may have posted about church before but I wanted to again with more detail.

Our church is part of the large evangelical church of Congo and our particular congregation gets a rotation of different pastors as the “higher up people send them our way. We’ve had three different pastors since we moved here in 2018 and the one who just arrived is pretty recently graduated from seminary. Our previous pastors were older so the one we have now is the youngest yet.

There are about 200 to 300 people on a normal Sunday and each Sunday someone counts the people and then gives a total head count for men, women and children separately. There’s always the most women. The “protocol” people go around and keep people from falling asleep and they occasionally kick out a noisy child. They are also in charge of seating and the people who arrive first must go to the front, and they fill the rows from front to back. The later you are the further back you sit. It kind of makes sense. If you come early, you are not allowed to sit in the back. No one seems to get to choose his own seat.

Announcements are long and various. The offering time is usually divided up into three “rounds.” The general offering and then two special offerings; for example, the choir, or a particular church related need. The sermon is usually not longer than 40 minutes, but the total service is anywhere from 1 and 1/2 hours to over two hours, which is short for a church service. The pastor periodically pauses during his sermons and breaks into song, usually beginning a few words of the song and the congregation quickly joins in. All our pastors have done this so I guess it’s not just a personal style.

The Covid phase of our church being affected passed while I was absent. You wouldn’t know Covid was even a thing if you saw us worshipping. Not a mask in sight, packed in like sardines and handshakes pretty much like usual. I guess people forgot about it already. As a side note, Covid is still a topic of conversation around here. People can be seen wearing masks around town (usually under their chin) and people will joke about someone having Covid if they are coughing or sneezing.

The church has two choirs, a traditional one and a modern one. They wear the same uniform, white tops and headscarves, and black pants or skirts. The modern choir is really nice sounding; the traditional choir takes some mental adjustment to enjoy. At least for my western-raised ears. At one point after a congregational song that the pastor requested, he told everyone to start over and sing it again because it wasn’t enthusiastic enough. So they sang again with more gusto and that time he was satisfied. There is typically pretty lively dancing and singing but I only know words to some of the songs so I can’t always join in properly. The church has a keyboard and microphones which are overly used. They also recently acquired a drum set (of a rustic sort) and this Sunday there was a teenage boy drumming and chewing gum. He looked very chill, but was drumming with exceptional talent. The traditional choir also uses drums but they are the animal skin kind.

This morning Orcxance stayed home with the girls so I went to church by myself. I don’t particularly like going by myself but this time it was actually very refreshing. I hadn’t been to church in a while due to illness so it was nice to be able to go, have a little walk (there and back) and spend a few minutes without the girls. The walk was not bad, and totally worth it for the “distractions” along the way. I even went to the market for a few minutes on the way back and picked up some things we needed.

When I got home Orcxance had cooked and deep cleaned our bedroom, repaired a broken power outlet, done the laundry, and bathed and fed the girls. We spent a lovely, relaxed afternoon in the yard visiting with neighbors, getting dirty and enjoying the beautiful day.

Wednesday 21 July 2021

High tech

Orcxance surprised me with something that is going to revolutionize my life. It’s a mini washing machine!!! I didn’t know it, but they actually sell those here in our progressive town. It’s from China, and kind of cute: about 3 feet high and a foot and a half wide. The instruction manual was actually somewhat readable, and that’s unusual for products that come with manuals.

Because of the decline of my hands, we had considered paying someone to do laundry, but after calculating what that would cost... well, it was way more than I thought. O had mentioned washing machines before, but I dismissed the idea not imagining where we would get one or how one would work with our electric situation or our tiny house. But he did his research well.

We put the machine near our shower area which is the one place in our house with a water drain to the outdoors. The machine has a little plastic tube drain that can be placed near our shower drain. We don’t use the “water introducing tube” and instead bring in buckets of water from outside to fill it up. I sometimes heat up some water and mix that in to make it warmer water, add powdered soap detergent and then the clothes. After the wash cycle is over, I let the water drain and bring in more buckets of water to refill it for the rinse cycle. Then when the rinse cycle is done I let that drain, pull out the clothes and wring them out and off to the clothesline they go!

It’s cut down my daily workload significantly, which gives me more time for other things like working on my cooking skills or spending more time reading to Molly. Normally I do laundry by hand twice a day, but I actually skipped doing laundry altogether one day, and did two days’ worth in about an hour. It was amazing! I won’t be able to use the machine for dirty or stained diapers or most of the kids’ really dirty clothes, but there’s a lot I can use it for. I’m pretty excited about it. Not because I mind doing laundry by hand; I actually kind of enjoy it, but my hands are literally being destroyed by the twice a day laundry routine and I’ve gone through all the pairs of rubber gloves already. So I’m really thankful for it.

Anyway, to continue the story of setting up the machine...The cord wasn’t nearly long enough to reach the only available power outlet. For some reason, our landlord thought having an outlet way up by the ceiling would be a good idea. Here we introduce the poorly made Chinese power strip/extension cord. You think all the cheap Chinese made products get sent to America? Wrong. The crummiest and cheaply-ist go to Africa. Hence the power strips that are always breaking. (Not a slam on the Chinese but on their crazy stuff that gets exported to the Third World.)

Well, the real problem is a combination of a faulty product and a faulty electrical system. Stuff is getting fried all the time. Orcxance found a broken power strip at work that no one wanted, and he scooped it up because he can fix stuff like that. You better believe it! He proceeded to crack open the power strip with a putty scraper and scissors, remove some screws and the burnt-out pieces, then cut the cord off a broken electric burner of ours, strip the wires and re-wire the cord from the electric burner into the power strip, complete the correct circuits and connections, close everything back up with electrical tape...then voila! The power strip worked. See photo below of broken electric burner:

So we plugged the power strip into the outlet way up high on the wall and plugged the washing machine into the power strip and my life suddenly just got easier.