We used to joke that there were two seasons here in PNG (Papua New Guinea): wet and wetter… apparently we were wrong.

It took us rather by surprise earlier this year when we only had about 700 gallons of water left in our storage tanks (you can read about our water collection system here: Mommy, Where Does Our Drinking Water Come From?). We didn’t realize “dry” season had started.  Yes, there is a dry season in PNG, which is hard to believe.  When does dry season end, you ask?  When it starts raining more again.  ;-)

So we decided to stop washing our clothes in the nice, clean tank water and start using river water, which may or may not be “clean” (it could be muddy, but it also needs to be purified before drinking).  The nice thing about river water is that it is piped to our house and almost always available.  It also doesn’t require that we use up our precious tank water to wash clothes.

Then last week we realized that we only had about 200 gallons left, just a few days supply.

And then (we NEVER expected to be saying this before we came to tropical, rainy PNG) our water tanks ran dry on Friday evening.

Upon finding out that our tanks were empty, our generous neighbor said they had plenty of water left in their tank and we were welcome to it any time.  So I (James) loaded up with pretty much every water container we had, filled them all at our neighbor’s house, and brought them back here.

In total, I carried back about 4 gallons.  Quite a lot when it’s just for drinking.

We put it in a water dispenser for easy access.

Since then, we’ve had a number of other offers for us to fill up with water.  We are so grateful for the generosity of others.

But drinking water isn’t the only problem.  With our large tanks dry, we only had what was left in our 2 small holding tanks on top of the roof (1 for hot, 1 for cold). So, that meant we needed to figure out how to wash dishes, wash hands, brush teeth, bathe, etc. all with very limited clean water.  We figured it’d be kind of like camping!  ;-)

We ended up purifying some river water (a little bleach does the trick, just like chlorine in the U.S.) and using that for our dish water.

As far as bathing, we’ve had a couple of offers from friends who have river water hooked up to their shower.  Nice.

Hand washing was pretty simple: just use hand sanitizer.

But that still presents the problem of having 2 very empty storage tanks, and no sign of any serious rain in the near future.  We’ve basically only had “giaman” rain (that’s Tok Pisin for “fake” rain that doesn’t fill up your tanks) for the last 3-4 weeks. A friend of ours who grew up here said this is the driest it’s been in at least 11 years!

We’ll have to leave you in suspense but do want to say, THANK YOU for praying!  There is a solution and we’re working on it right now.  We’ll post about it soon.