It’s still “dry season” here in Papua New Guinea (PNG).  Many people in Ukarumpa (our support center) have water tanks that are dry or almost empty.  It’s also getting hard for the Papua New Guineans living around us because their crops aren’t doing very well.  And we still haven’t had enough rain to fill our tanks.  As of about 1 month ago, both our small and large tanks were completely dry (see this post here: Posts from PNG: Dry Water Tanks).

We still need prayer for rain.

So when our tanks were dry, we were totally without drinking water and had to get clean water from friends.  This was a challenge and made it so we had to seriously conserve water.  After a few days of this inconvenience, we decided that we should bite the bullet and fill one of our tanks with river water and purify it.  That way we would have water to drink, bathe and wash dishes with, etc.  We had been hesitant to do this because the river water usually has quite a lot of sediment in it and we didn’t want to put that in our tank.  But, God blessed us with clear water and we filled the tank (about 1000 gallons) in about 6-8 hours.

Then we purified it with bleach, which is similar to using chlorine to purify water in the U.S.  After waiting 24 hours, we had 1000 gallons of safe water to use.  Praise God!

But, it has hardly rained since filling our tank, and when I checked our 1000 gallon tank a few days ago, it was down to about 250 gallons.  That’s only about 4-5 days worth for “normal” usage!  So we went into hyper-conservation mode.  We washed our hands with hand sanitizer, purified river water for washing dishes in a bucket (and only changed it when we absolutely had to), and skipped showers and baths because that would use what precious little tank water we had.  I also began fetching drinking water from some fellow missionaries again (about 7 gallons/60 pounds) at a time.  We thought about filling our tank again, but the river water had quite a bit of sediment in it again.

This past weekend, the river water cleared up and we decided to fill our tank again… our large one this time so we wouldn’t run out so quickly if it didn’t rain.  As I was trying to figure out how to fill the tank, I took off the screen (which catches leaves and such) and looked inside.  To my amazement, I wasn’t staring at an empty tank, but found myself looking at about 900 gallons!!  I couldn’t believe it and actually thought, “did God just put this water in here?” as in “miraculously, instantly, and without rain”.  I was truly amazed.

Then I remembered that it had rained some in the last month, but just off and on for a few days, and must have been mostly at night when we didn’t hear it.  I had seen the little tank overflowing into the big tank, but it did NOT look like 900 gallons!  That means that whatever we had used in the little tank since bleaching it had been re-filled by the rain PLUS 900 gallons had been added to the large tank.  So, at least 1000 gallons must have fallen on our house in just a few days.  That’s crazy!

So… the funny part was that up until this weekend, we thought our large tank was dry and the small tank was being used up.  Then, when we thought we were getting really low, we started conserving water like crazy and praying that it would rain.  But, God had already provided about 1 week after we sent out our last email with the overflow into the big tank… we just didn’t know it and didn’t suspect it because we really didn’t think it had rained that much.  Isn’t He faithful?!?!