Many people wonder where we get our drinking water. The answer is quite simple really: God provides it when it rains. Hey, he flooded the entire earth once, so providing a little bit of rain for us to collect and drink is no big deal. And we don’t just use it for drinking, we also use it for cooking, bathing/showering, and washing our dishes. There have been times when we wonder if we’ll have enough because our supply is getting low, but He always provides (more on that later).

What’s the collection system you ask? It’s our entire roof! Here in PNG, “whiteskin” (that is, missionaries like us with white skin) roofs are often made of roofing metal.

A plus to using metal over other things is that it stays fairly clean and doesn’t add “fun” bits to our water. By that I mean we avoid the little pebbles that would come from shingles or the bits of stick and grass that would come from a natural roof as found on a traditional Papua New Guinean house.

Ok, so we have a roof. But, how does the water get where we can drink it? Gutters line the entire length of our roof.

These gutters empty into big pipes, which in turn empty into huge tanks.

This is the system that comes “standard” with all “whiteskin” buildings. We personally have a 1000 gallon tank and a 2250 gallon tank. That’s a total of 3250 gallons of water available to us… if we have enough rain.

Have we ever run out? No. But we’ve been close. Normally, I try to use the 1000 gallon tank and keep the 2250 gallon in reserve. Therefore, if the 1000 gallon tank runs dry (as it does on occasion), we still have 2250 gallons left. Running it the other way would mean we only have about 1000 gallons in reserve and that’s cutting it kind of close.

Well, it was one of those occasions where our 1000 gallon tank had run dry (you can tell when the water pump keeps running and running and doesn’t shut off). I went out to open the 2250 gallon tank and found it was mostly empty, which was disconcerting because we only had about 820 gallons of water left when I was expecting a full tank. We had been using our water more liberally for washing clothes, and quickly decided that if we were to have any water left in a few days, we’d need to use the RAM (river) water provided by our center.

Back to 820 gallons of water… that’s not really that much when it’s your only source of clean water and you need to shower, wash your hands, wash your dishes, AND drink from it. So, we prayed and boy did God provide! Are you really that surprised? The Bible says that God sends rain to everyone (Matthew 5:45). Within a week, our tanks were overflowing. This was an astonishing rate of rainfall. Over 2500 gallons fell on our roof in a week! Based on the fact that our roof is only about 1620 square feet, that’s about 1.5 gallons per square foot. Yeah! It REALLY rains hard here.