The Problem Behind The Wall

Stone Wall (Photo credit: sobriquet.net)

When we moved into this house in October 2012, a lot of work had gone into preparing it but it was still in need of a lot of TLC. David is still making repairs. His progress is sometimes slowed by other circumstances, including the fact that now we have lived here long enough for some of the original repairs to need their own repairs!

One toilet, from day one, had issues. Previous occupants had installed it improperly. It is an unbelievably loud toilet when the tank is filling. The tank is not level. One side is a full inch higher than the other, so parts don't align properly and they break quickly. Like within days. So we quit buying parts and the only way to flush it was to remove the lid to the tank and stick your hand in the water and pull up the thingymabobber yourself.

We have more than one toilet so my way of dealing with it was to avoid using it.

This past weekend, David decided to try a different approach. Instead of the typical "push button" on toilets here, he fixed a wire to come up through the hole where the button would normally be and made a temporary handle so that now you can just pull the wire up and it lifts the thingymabobber and does the flushing. Yaay!

The hot water connection beneath the sink in the same bathroom had recently begun dripping, so while he was in there he decided to tighten that connection. Almost as soon as he grasped it, the knob broke off in his hand and water started spewing everywhere. You can't just shut off the water to one room in this house like we can in the states, so it was a big deal to have to shut off the water pending a repair. Our Saturday agenda had just been rewritten.

When David attempted to removed the broken piece of plumbing, the next section had rusted through and ALSO broke off. That made our big deal even bigger. Here, the walls are concrete, not drywall, and they concrete right over the plumbing. David spent hours with a hammer and chisel trying to get through the wall all the way back to the broken pipe without breaking more than one ceramic tile or hitting the sink with the hammer. The power was out during all this so I was sitting in there holding a flashlight for him. Neither of us would say it out loud but we were both really hoping that the next section of pipe would not also be rusted through and would stay intact.

The next challenge was finding the right parts, but a local hole in the wall "hardware store" actually had enough of what we needed to at least get the wall closed back up and be able to turn on the water again. I won't have a usable sink in there until we find a couple more parts but at least I have water to the rest of the house and my bathroom got a good mopping!

Very often in Congo, what appears to be a small repair turns out to be a big one.

I think sometimes people are like that too. We never know when someone does or says something to us that has a hint of anger, criticism, or malice what is lying on the other side of their wall and what might be going on with their inmost parts. Maybe they have a burden or a hurt that is way bigger than we can know. Maybe deep inside they have broken places that need God's love and healing.