I have been home for a few days now and I thought I had better finish off this journal.
I should start with just Monday, March 8 but I think I will give an abbreviated version and give you the whole week all mixed together. This last week I was busy trying to tie up loose ends. We decided to order a faucet for the kitchen sink from Kampala Uganda and see if it would make it here before I left. Well, wouldn’t you know, the next time I was in town I tried one last store to find the odd size kitchen faucet and I found one. Even though we had ordered one I went ahead and bought this one, you never know. When I went to install it of course there was a rusted pipe that had to be replaced (I hate plumbing).
I put new screens on the front door and one window on the porch. In the end I did not have time to finish 3 other windows but I will leave that to a carpenter guy we found. He came to help with the kitchen countertop. He measured the countertop on Monday and came back Thursday with the new one. I went to Nyankunde Thursday (more on that in a minute) so when he came back Friday morning we tried to put it on, but he measured wrong and it was a bit small. He took it back to his shop and returned about 3 hours later and we got it all installed. There is no Formica in Bunia so we had to order that from Kampala as well. The carpenter will come back some day to finish off the job.
As mentioned above, Thursday I took the better part of the day to go to Nyankunde. This is where Rich and Ruth Dix are working under Samaritan’s Purse at the hospital. Things at Nyankunde were really messed up during the unrest in Congo and the whole station is in disrepair. Rich’s part will be to build the new wing for the hospital after fixing up some of the housing. Ruth is an OB/GYN doctor and is spending a lot of time at the hospital seeing patents and working with nurses. The neat thing here is that Rich and Ruth had been in Nyankunde for years before returning to California for family reasons. God has opened up the door for them to return to Africa for a short time to help in this way (even though they are getting along in years).
Late Thursday after getting back from Nyankunde I finished up installing a voltage stabilizer on one of the circuits in the house (the one most used for lights and the refrigerator).
Thursday evening I was told that our AIM AIR plane only had permissions from the government to fly up to Friday, not Saturday. That meant we had to leave a day early, and have one less day to tie up the loose ends.
Friday morning I franticly tried to solve another electrical problem. I was checking the voltage at an electrical outlet and saw a spark on the inside of the socket and a circuit breaker blew. Now what? I found the wires were kind of corroded on the back of the socket so I cleaned them up and put the socket back in, but the circuit breaker was still popping. After a bit of checking I found the 2 wires going to the hot side of the socket were hooked up to different phases. Basically what that means is you have a short circuit. Glad for circuit breakers that do their jobs! I guess they had been shorted before and that is why the wires were corroded, my cleaning them up did not help any. Why they were like that I have no idea. I hope there are not too many more things like this in the house. I connected only one of the wires (and isolated the other one) and the problem went away. I was glad I was able to figure this one out. I was half thinking I was going to need to stay longer in Congo.
With all the electrical problems straightened out (well, as best as they can be with half the voltage there should be coming to the house) and most everything else done I was free to go home. I was glad to go, too. In the last 4½ weeks I had been home for less than 6 days.
With my returning early I had to change my flight from Uganda to Rwanda to a day earlier. I called Lisa to have her do this for me. What a fiasco she had, but thankfully she succeeded. One thing that was kind of interesting on my flight from DR Congo to Uganda on AIM AIR was that the pilot did not care if our cell phones were on so I was able to text Lisa while in flight to see how my ticket change was going. Sometimes there was no coverage but if I waited a few miles it came back.
Now that I am home I am catching up on all that was waiting for me. I think the lawyer has made good progress on getting RIET’s new legal status worked out. That means I can start looking towards construction some day, hopefully soon. I will keep you posted.
Until next time.
Love,
Mark
