Story Time

Gather ‘round, boys and girls. I’d like to start this week off with a little story (actually it turned out to be not-so-little but please read anyway as it involves me looking foolish and should be entertaining) that I think illustrates certain frustrations I’ve encountered in the work arena quite well:

Sunday morning was shaping up to be just great. I’d had a long week in and around the Namumu office, running here and there, seeing to the daily details of the Namumu income-generating activities (which shall henceforth be referred to as IGA’s). Even Saturday I spent most of the day working, preparing and planting in the garden beds and going to check on the repairs to our kapenta boat engine. But Sunday…oooh Sunday I was going to get to sleep in. I’d been getting up around 6 each morning to clean my house before heading to the office, but since I wouldn’t have to get out to meet Munjongo to go to worship until around 9:30 (Munjongo said 9 but in African time that means 9:30) I was going to get some quality rest.

My phone rang at 6:14. Yes, I have a phone now, something I avoided getting until recently, probably because I knew that once I got one people would be calling me at 6:14. It was the captain of “Lucy”, one of our kapenta boats (“Namumu” is the other), wanting to tell me that there’s a problem with the engine. At least that’s what I gathered, as our fishermen speak Tonga, the local tribal language, almost exclusively, and while they do know some English we still have communication difficulties.

We have a man who has been supervising the fishing operations, a nice man in what I’m guessing to be his late 30’s, named Mubita. Mubita speaks good English and is my guy I use when I need to communicate with our fishermen. However, as I had recently been informed that Mubita did not have a phone at the time, I had no way of getting in touch with him to find out the specific problem. Plus, he usually meets our boats in the morning at the harbor to collect and sell the night’s kapenta catches (the boats fish all night), but since the boat’s engine had been miraculously fixed the day before I started to think that perhaps the message had not reached him that they had gone out the night before and that he might not even show up. So, I rolled out of bed, got dressed, grabbed some bread and headed out the door to meet our boat at the harbor.

It’s a nice 30 minutes walk to the harbor, partially through the woods on a foot path and partially on a paved road. The morning air was fresh and cool. I was now fully awake with my blood flowing, feeling better about life. Then it started to rain. Awesome, I thought. Just the previous evening I had loaned out my only rain coat to my friend, Patrick Luneta (you may remember his cousin, John Luneta, from a previous blog) for his walk home from my house, so turning back home wouldn’t do much good as I had no other rain gear. I decided to press on (wearing only, ironically enough, an old high school t-shirt that says on the back, “The Rapids will get you wet”).

So there I am, walking briskly along the path, still feeling pretty good despite everything. I came up to a section of the path that goes through a stream. It’s not a big stream, but it was higher and faster than usual with all of the rain we’d been getting. There are a number of rocks sticking out, so I decided to, as I’d seen done by many and as I myself had done before, jump nimbly-bimbly from rock to rock to get to the other side. Three-quarters of the way there I make a not-so-nimbly-bimbly jump onto a rock and it turns over, sending my foot about 5 inches down to the bottom. So I reach the other side with one wet foot, seriously considering sticking the other foot in since having shoes of a mismatched dryness might actually be more annoying than having two wet feet. I decided against it, however, and continued.

Undaunted, I cruised through the path and up the road to the harbor. The hills are very green and quite lovely at this time of year, which I was able to appreciate even given my somewhat miserable state. I made it to the harbor after a brisk 25 minute walk, expecting to find the boat waiting.

After standing, shivering, under a lakeside hut for around an hour, chatting on and off with some young local guys who didn’t speak much English and who I’m pretty sure were laughing at me, the boats arrived. Since they park on the opposite side of the lake from which I was standing, they swung by, picked me up, and took me over.

Where I found Mubita. Who, by the way, does have a phone, and has had one the whole time, about which I had apparently been misinformed.

The engine was indeed broken and in need of repair, so we sold off all the night’s catches (easily done this time of year as most boats’ catches are low and as kapenta are always in high demand) and made plans to repair the engine, the same engine that we had been taking for repairs the entire previous week, all of which could have been told over the phone. Then it started to rain again. Hard. And I got back too late to go to church.

The story does have a happy ending, though, and if reading it made you as sad as it made me living it then you’re going to need to hear one. I came back home and collapsed into a long, peaceful sleep that pretty much took up my entire afternoon. Boo ya.

Before I end this sad, sad post, let me be clear: there’s nowhere else in the world I’d rather be at this moment. God has me right where he wants me. I love the people around me and I love my job. Sometimes, and almost always because of communication issues, it just gets very very frustrating.