Our life sometimes seems like an episode of Survivor Africa. When Hilary and I came back to the U.S. in 2002, Survivor Africa was on T.V. and we looked at each other and rolled our eyes.  “You call that roughing it?!?” Sometimes our life is more like an episode of Lost.  Strange noises emanate from the dark woods.  We spend a good amount of our time in a state of bewilderment.  Most of the time, however, our life is a lot like Gilligan’s Island.  We’re a small group of basically silly people living in close contact and having daily episodes of goofy situations.  I identify most closely with Gilligan.  But I’m most often called on to act like the Professor.  Except the Professor never had to deal with the toilet seat breaking. At least not in any of the episodes that I watched as a kid.

This is a tale of our castaways.

Yesterday morning I started the day by repairing the dustpan.  Actually the rivet on one side of the handle came off a couple years ago and had already been replaced by: 1. punching a hole in the pan and flange on the handle with a nail, 2. passing a small bolt through the hole, 3. tightening it up.  This morning I had to do that on the other side because the other rivet had popped.  Have you ever repaired your dustpan?  It’s nice to start the day off with a feeling of accomplishment.

This morning’s victory was more hard-fought.  The toilet seat broke a couple of days ago and certain members of our family were growing tired of having to put the half circle that had fallen off next to the rest of the toilet seat that was still attached and then try to sit down on it without pinching anything important.  The truth is that I had a spare toilet seat but it wasn’t a nice oak toilet seat like the one that broke.  It was an old scratched up rat-chewed white plastic seat that we used to have mounted to a box in our outhouse.  However, in the process of moving everything to this new house I had misplaced the little bolt thingies that attach the toilet seat to the toilet.  Eventually I found one, and decided I would just build another one like it using bolts, washers and a spare plastic thing off of some other broken possession.

I learned early on in Mozambique that if a part is missing or broken you just have to make something like it and improvise.  My first experience was when our fridge door fell off.  The bottom hinge just broke one day.  So I took the plastic and metal part to a welder and he actually made an identical piece out of steel.  “Steel” working to this day!

Well, I finally got the toilet seat assembled. It wasn’t pretty but it seemed to be holding as long as you didn’t shake it around too much. So I headed off to check on how my storage shed organization project was going. The guard had taken out all the various boxes filled with jumbles of electrical wire, rusty nails, dried cans of paint, rat-chewed papers and lizard poop.  He had spread this all out in our gazebo and was starting to organize it into sections.  And there right in the middle of everything was a matching set of toilet seat bolts!  I could have fallen off my stool! I went back into the house, took apart my other contraption and reassembled the toilet seat with the correct bolts.

This afternoon I had to rig up a solar battery charger since I somehow blew up our battery charger last week when I hooked it up to our solar batteries.  I think it had something to do with too many amps. After the sun went down I checked the AA batteries that I had been charging and they had gone from 1.04 volts to 1.34 volts! Yet another problem solved!

I forgot to mention that while I was in the bathroom fixing the toilet there was an enormous crack in the living room.  I came out to discover that a section of our dining room tabletop had broken off.  That project will have to wait for tomorrow.

Of course I could tell you about some of the “real” ministry that I did today, but most of that involves doing just what you’re doing right now: sitting in front of a computer.  Not nearly as interesting to read about as broken toilet seats and exploding battery chargers.

Today is what we call a “plus one” day.  I get two points for fixing two things that were broken.  But I lose a point for the table breaking.  Still it was a positive day.