We are in Tacna. A family from the church is out of town, so we are staying in their house, just the four of us. The last time we stayed in Tacna, we stayed with Yolanda, the missionary here. She lives with another lady from the church. The house they live in has one bedroom and they share it. The bed we slept in was like sleeping on 2 x 4´s. The pillow on one bed was covered by a tee shirt. The other bed used rolled up blankets as pillows. I began to ponder how many things we think we have to have. My mind would never think of putting a tee shirt on a pillow. Although in our many adventures as missionaries I have slept on things from a back pack to a rolled up jacket, in my house, pillows are the only option. Or at least it used to be.
The house we are staying in has a shower with a widow maker. I blogged about widow makers several years ago. We used those to heat the shower water in Costa Rica. It is actually an electric water heater which heats the water as it runs through the water head. Kind of strange someone would invent something electric in the shower to heat the water; hence the name, window maker. The majority of the people here shower with cold water. It is in the lower to mid 60´s right now. And the water feels a lot colder than that. Thus when we saw the widow maker, we were excited. We will be here until Sunday, so hot showers! Honestly, we have tried to take showers with cold water. The boys did it for a while. However, my mind just shuts down when the cold water hits my body. Some things are in the mind. (Garrett just came out of the shower and told us, "The knob in the shower shocked me a little bit.")
Then there is the issue with not having a toliet lid. Now folks, this is in the mind. Neither of the houses we have stayed in had one. Tyler asked me what he was supposed to do when he had to really go...I said, ¨Make sure the rim is clean and tell yourself it´s a toliet lid.¨ It is not so bad once you get it out of your mind there has to be a lid on the toliet.
I realize this post is a bit strange. I guess my piont is some things we think we can´t do without is just a matter of the mind. I am not saying I would throw my pillows out to the trash on Monday. Nor would we trade our gas heated shower for another widow maker. And I really like my toliet lid. But, sooner or later we have to grasp with how the majority of the world lives. Sometimes it´s all in our mind.
