Balikpapan and Eid Al Adha

I didn't post last Sunday because I didn't get back from Balikpapan until late afternoon.  I was exhausted and also had to take care of some school work before Monday came around.  Balikpapan is a city about an hours flight away from Tarakan.  It's an oil town so it has a lot of Westerners which means a lot of stores cater to Western tastes. 

I went with Holly Underhill and Angela Moore.  The weekend ended up being a marathon shopping trip.  Holly is a shopping queen.  She knows all the places to go for good deals and great buys.  And we hit them all.  On the way to Balikpapan we each had our carry-ons tucked into our regular suitcases.  On the way home, we had carry-ons and checked bags stuffed to the gills.  What did we buy?  Holly and Angela were buying Christmas presents and all of us were on the lookout for American foods we miss.  For example:  Parmesan and Cheddar cheese, cranberries and cranberry sauce, Snickers, almonds, black olives, salsa, lunch meat, bacon, and we even hauled a 13 lb turkey home.  We'll eat him at our MAF Thanksgiving meal. 

 There is a McDonald's in Balikpapan.  I usually don't eat at McD's in the States but I did there.  The hamburger tasted so good, we ended up eating at McDonald's twice.  :o)  Here is a picture of us ready to return home with loaded baggage. 

Angela, me, Holly

 

 

Friday was a Muslim holiday here.  It is one of the Eid festivals.  The "greater" Eid is Eid al Fitri which comes at the end of the month of Ramadan.  The festival this past Friday is the "lesser" Eid - the Eid Al Adha.  Not sure what the Arabic means, but according to Islam, it is the celebration of the time Abraham almost sacrificed his son Ishmael.  No typo there.  That is what they believe happened.  You can google it.  Hundreds of cows or goats are slaughtered during this festival in commemoration of the event.  And the mosques sound the prayers from seven to ten on the eve of the festival and then from four-thirty to seven-thirty on the morning of the festival.  I'm attaching a video of a mosque call to prayer.  There isn't anything to see because I took it at night.  Envision this "call" going on for three hours.  

 

 

 

We MAF'ers live in a predominantly Muslim culture.  Friendly, kind, generous Muslims.  We try to live exemplary lives among them.   You can pray that we succeed.  

Play, pouring rain and power.

You will remember from last week's post that we had standing water in the school due to an overflowing tank in the attic.  One casualty of the flood was the large bean bag that sits in the library - it got soaked.  Holly (one of the moms) suggested we dump its innards out onto a tarp so the sun could dry the styrofoam pellets and hopefully remove the moldy stench.  But the tarp was dirty.  So we had a slip 'n slide day during P.E. last week to "clean" the tarp.  The tarp didn't really get very clean (Chad and I had to wipe it down after the fun) but the kids had a good time and thought they were being helpful at the same time.  

Aunt Mary, at the top of the hill with the hose; Uncle Chad at the bottom of the slip 'n slide taking pictures.  


Every Thursday night the MAF team gets together.  Some nights we pray, some we just sing, others we study a portion of the Bible or we have a team meeting.  Last Thursday, I was riding my scooter home from one of these get-togethers when it started to rain.  Not just rain but rain in torrents!  By the time I got home, I was soaked.  And I am not just using that word for effect.  I was dripping water.  I was able to wring water out of my clothes.  I would have taken a picture of my drowned-rat self, but the electricity was off and without lights it would have been too dark a picture for you to really get a good laugh.  I actually was laughing by the time I got home.  It was just so, so,....  I don't know - ludicrous?  It was either laugh or cry.  I decided to laugh! :o)

The electricity being off brings me to another aspect of my life here.  We have been having regular power outages.  Not an uncommon thing here in Tarakan.  For a variety of reasons, there isn't enough power to supply the entire town with electricity all of the time.  So neighborhoods take turns having their electricity shut off.  Like today - the electricity was off from around noon til about 3:00, which is actually a very short outage.   BUT - just last week, a generator was installed at my house because my house is also the school.  It is very hard to concentrate on your school work when your are dripping sweat.  So our wonderful base manager (Brian Underhill) brought the old generator from the hangar and got it up and running for the school.  How lucky for me that I live at school! 

 

A yellow generator is a thing of beauty forever.  I had lessons on how to get it up and running.  Not as hard as you might think.  In fact, not hard at all.  Kind of like starting a car. 

 

Well, that's all for this week.  Tune in next week.  I'm going to Balikpapan (an hour flight from here) for a little  R and R.  Maybe I'll have some interesting stories from that trip.  Talk to you later.

It Could Have Been Worse

This past week I was wondering what I would blog about this Sunday.  But Friday came and gave me something to write about. 

Friday evening I was invited to dinner at another MAF family's house. ( BTW, the food was delicious!  The ladies here are such good cooks.)  Anyway - when I left the house, the electricity was off.  (Just so you know, we are currently on a one-day-on, one-day-off power outage scheule.  The power outages last about 5 - 6 hours.)  Back to the story.  When the electricity is off, usually there is no water in the house because the pump is electric.  But whoever lived here last year rigged some kind of gravity tank so that there would always be water.  This tank is in the attic right outside my bedroom door.  Too many details; you're already bored.  I'll just cut to the chase.  While I was gone, this tank started filling up but never stopped filling and yes, you guessed it - started overflowing.  I'm not sure how long it ran but when I got home water was pouring out of the ceiling and down into the basement.  It was pouring through the basement ceiling into Chad's classroom and the library.  There were about two inches of standing water on the floor of the classroom, the library and the hallway. 

I frantically called our program manager and he came to my rescue.  While I waited on him to arrive, I was dashing about like a chicken with its head cut off.  I didn't know what to do first.  I didn't have a clue how to stop the flow of water; there were so many places it was pouring out of that getting a bucket didn't even cross my mind.  I just kind of dashed hither and yon fruitlessly. 

Long story short - we got the water turned off, several people came over to help sop up the mess and by 11:30 we had most of it cleaned up. 

Now the real work begins.  Finding out why the tank ran over and what to do about it.  Thankfully, not my job. 

I didn't get any pictures because unfortunately my camera got a little bit wet.  It's fine now.  So I took a picture of the big hole that is now in my celing.  You can just see the infamous orange tank in this picture.  It is sitting on a platform which I hope is a sturdily built platform.  If that tank should ever come crashing down out of the attic - Good-bye cruel world. 

 

This is the spot where water was pouring out onto the bookshelves. 

 

 

 Water-logged books drying out in front of the fan.  

 

 

I'm just thankful it wasn't worse and that I didn't have to clean up the mess by myself. 

 

Until next Sunday!