Water.

There are many challenges to living on a ship in West Africa...no clothing stores, no fast food restaurants, limited options for eating out in general, no movie theaters, no music downloading, no seeing popular TV shows (unless they're on the Discovery channel or BBC!), among other things. These things I can handle and willingly gave up when I joined Mercy Ships nearly 3 years ago.

One thing I did not think about when I moved to the Africa Mercy was the challenge of water. I took it for granted that water is treatable and it wouldn't be a problem. I knew it wouldn't be super easy to get and that we'd have to work hard to conserve. I knew we'd have to take 2-minute ship showers (turn the water on, get wet, turn the water off, soap up, turn the water on to rinse off), and by now am well practiced at it!

Back in the Liberia days, water was an issue. The laundry room was closed for a time and we spent a while eating off of disposable plates using plastic silverware (and lots of it because it breaks so easily!). However, I was only in Liberia for 4 months, and since then (being in Tenerife, Benin, and Togo), we've never had any sort of true water problems that I've been aware of.

Appelsbosch (where we lived in South Africa) had some unique lessons to teach me - one happened to be about my frustrations regarding my expectations over things like running water. It would randomly go in and out, usually when I was doing my laundry or in the middle of my shower.

And now we are back in a war-torn country. Sierra Leone and Liberia's histories are linked, as are their socioeconomic situations. And again, we are having problems with water. Water mains breaking in town; delays in receiving water deliveries; receiving low-quality water that takes days to treat; unusually high water consumption by the crew. All of this culminated last week and on Thursday the laundry was shut down and we switched to disposables in the dining room. The captain even asked us to avoid showering if possible! Saturday saw the water being shut off completely for a few hours, then slowly back on for cleaning purposes - but no showers allowed. We are even supposed to report improper water usage to the captain!

Today, finally, everything has been reinstated on a limited basis, much to everyone's relief. We must still be cautious and our water situation is still critical, and is likely to remain that way for most of the outreach. We also have no hot water in the cabins to encourage short showers :)

Thankfully none of this has really stressed me out. I was desperate for a shower on Saturday, especially since I hadn't had one for a few days and we came back all sandy and salt-watery from the beach on Saturday to discover there was no water. However, sometimes it is nice to have things in our lives that stretch us, something to break us out of our ordinary routine. And this water situation is one of them.

Please pray with us that the water situation is resolved soon, and that frustrations can be soothed.