The first occurrence was a problem all too common around the world, however, very uncommon here in PNG: The lack of water. We only had 11 days of draught, but in a country where it usually rains at least once a day, this is more than enough. After all, we are supposed to live in the RAINforest. Longtime missionaries said they have seen nothing like that in all their years of service.
Now, we did not actually lack any water – not quite yet. But our water tanks were at about 1/3 of their usual level and I got a bit worried (how very typically Swiss). I thought about ways to save water, and I envisioned us bathing and washing clothes in the river (which is not really something extraordinary, rather something all the locals do), as well as going into the bush with shovel and water canister to dig up a well in a Sago swamp.
Thank God, it rained before we got to that point. But it certainly showed how dependent we are on tap water.
The second incident also brought us close to disaster: Our milk powder supply got to a critical low and we couldn't find new one. We had bought the first bag in Mt Hagen, but now there was none to have in the whole town. Other people had some connections to suppliers, but in the end all of them bought it in Lae and nobody was likely to go there in the near future.
So, we started using less powder but the same amount of water, which was ok for Müesli but not really for drinking. Fortunately, this only affected Joelle, who didn't complain. Again, I saw us running out of milk and using I-don't-know-what as a substitute.
And then we got saved by a Swiss couple (a fellow MAF pilot), who happened to be on holidays at a Swiss mission station where they kept – being true to our cow/chocolate/cheese image – a stock of milk powder bags. How very typically Swiss.
And again we realised, how much we are caught in our heritage.
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| Our own cow – 25kg milk powder |