The challenges of living in Nigeria . . .

Two things to begin this blog . . . Number 1- you will only understand and fully appreciate how cool the title of this blog is, if you live in Nigeria . . .

Secondly, I need to tell you just how wonderful our compound parents, Chris and Helen are and how continually thankful I am for all they do for each of us. Chris and Helen are from New Zealand, and have been missionaries in West Africa for over 30 years. They just moved to Nigeria a few months ago to help in the SIM office, and boy let me tell you, they couldn’t have picked a busier time to move somewhere and learn a new job.

From the moment they arrived they have been bombarded with lots and lots of work. Even though they have been so incredibly busy, they have the time, to throw birthday parties for missionaries, have a weekly prayer meeting for our compound, have seminars about how to live in Nigeria, make sure we have enough food and dishes, sort our visa issues, help us develop our goals amongst MANY other things. Just saying that makes me tired!

So on top of all this, Chris is also sort of the fix-it guy for the compound . . . when you run out of gas you tell Chris, when you can’t find your keys, or your door won’t open even though you have your keys, or if you don’t have hot water, or any water, etc. you tell Chris . . .
So over the few months that I have lived here in Nigeria we have had many (and I mean many) funny maintenance issues at our compound . . . several of which are VERY funny, so I thought I would highlight a few and share them with you, especially since a few of them have just occurred in the past 24 hours.

#1: Our septic Tank overflowed a few months ago . . .
At home, not a big problem, you call the sewage company, they bring a truck and pump it out . . . In Nigeria, sewage companies and trucks that pump stuff out don’t exsist . . . so you call the construction guy and get his men to dig a new hole, and empty the old hole with buckets and wheel barrows . . . The men that cleaned that out are amazing, praise the Lord for their servant hearts . . .

#2 Breaking down Ruth’s door (also a few months ago) . . .
When Ruth’s got locked out of her house . . .let me say she did have her key’s she just couldn’t get them to open her door . . . it was time to break down the door. Around 9:oopm on our compound, all the guys were up with their tools trying to open the door . . .they ended up just breaking down the door frame with brute force – it was quite hilarious to watch, but eventually Ruth did get back into her house!

#3 Jamie getting locked out of her house . . holding her keys . . . (yesterday)
So all of the sudden, I can’t lock or unlock my house, yesterday upon returning from the office, I tried to unlock my house and nothing happened. The key turns, and turns and turns, but the door doesn’t unlock. Ruth and I decide to kick the door really hard, cause you never know, it might work, AND praise the Lord it did work! The door opened! So when I left again, I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to lock the door, but we decided it would be okay . . . well when we arrived home from dinner, I couldn’t get my door to unlock again . . . praise the Lord after a lot of fiddling around with it, it finally opened, but the whole deadbolt came out!! I was holding it in my hand!

#4 A chunk of my wall tile fell down in the middle of the night . . .
At some point during the night last night, I heard a HUGE crashing sound. I assumed that my kitchen curtain had knocked over my bottle of dish soap, because that happens all the time. So when I woke up this morning and walked into the kitchen to make my coffee, I noticed that my dish soap was still standing on the shelf . . . while boiling my water . . . I looked and the ground and realized there was a pretty large chunk of something on the ground. Upon further inspection, I realized it was a piece of tile, looking up, I could see that it fell out of my wall from above my door!

Well, these are all pretty minor things (expect for the sewage thing), but I thought I would share a few funny stories about living in Nigeria . . . I didn’t even include the stories about our ever leaking water tank and our over-flowing washing machine, but I’ll save those for another day!