When One of Those Days Turns Into One of Those Weeks

Missionaries deal with stress in their chosen field on a daily basis. Most times it’s small things that add up, though sometimes we face huge stressors and have to deal with them without the normal coping mechanisms set up in our culture. This blog post talks about it in more depth than I’m going to cover here.

For the most part, I try to keep a fairly upbeat and positive view of life. I try. I don’t always succeed. I want to paint a picture of Uganda and Africa for those who don’t live here. Most of what we experience is good. There are times when it isn’t. I’d be giving an unbalanced view if I never told about the bad stuff too.

This was one of those weeks. Let me give you the breakdown:

Tuesday – Water was off all day but we didn’t know it and emptied our water tank — for the third time in a week. When it did come back on, the water came out of the faucet and showers brown.

Wednesday – A hinge on our gate broke, making it impossible to open the gate without breaking the other hinge. This meant we couldn’t drive anywhere, including to church on Sunday, until it was repaired. (The landlord had someone out to fix it on Friday so we were able to get out and go to the churches on Sunday.)

Thursday – Let me go back to Tuesday. The ISP we’ve been using is in bankruptcy. We decided it would be wise to try a different one. James picked one of the two other options we have in our town that are affordable and set up an account at their office on Tuesday. Thursday morning, we discovered that all our data, purchased two days before, was gone. And we didn’t use it. We went to the company but they wouldn’t acknowledge there was a problem. Their only solution? Spend more money for more data (which I was confident would then just disappear like the other had done). We spent most of Thursday and Friday dealing with this company and they refused to even work with us.

Friday – We discovered that the gate problem was really a wall problem and that the recently repaired wall was tilting over far enough that, if we keep getting rain like we have been (rain that we need, mind you!) the wall will fall over in another week or so.

Saturday – We woke to discover that now, instead of being empty, our water tanks were full and overflowing! A valve up in the tank got stuck open. Water was running everywhere. Thankfully, our guard put out buckets and caught enough of it that it didn’t wash out the ground.  Once we used some water out of the tank, the valve began opening and shutting on its own so we didn’t have to call a repairman.

Sunday – We found out more of the roof at Ngarama had blown off in a storm on Thursday and that the refugees hadn’t gotten food rations in a month. To top it off, James squished a mosquito on the windshield and the whole windshield cracked.

Now, usually things don’t go quite like this for us. All this adds up to massive amounts of stress. It’s hard to function with this much stress. It’s hard to be nice to each other and when under this much stress.

But what can you do about it? The only option would be getting away from it and that brings stress of its own.

I’ll be posting about coping mechanisms and how we deal with stress in another post.

On a positive note, I look forward to how God is going to work everything out. (He already worked out the internet problem! He’s amazing!)

When you read these things, don’t feel sorry for us. We made a choice to live here in Uganda. Most of the time we enjoy it. But pray for us that we will handle everything with grace and that people will see Jesus in us.