Wednesday, May 03, 2006


The phone is up!!!

It seems about once every six months the phones here in Namatanai go out for an extended period of time. (Anywhere from one week to six weeks.) When the phone is working properly, we usually have it for 8 hours a day on the week days, and four hours a day on the weekends. You might be thinking what if you have to call for an ambulance. No problem, since there is no ambulance to call for. For that matter there is no doctor to call for either. Well, what if I want to order pizza from Pizza Hut? No problem there either, no Pizza Hut. (No pizza place at all.) I wonder if we get a doctor here, if a Pizza Hut would follow? Wow, I am really suffering for my faith. :)

Now, there are advantages to our phone situation: I have never received one phone call from one telemarketer asking me to switch my long distance service or accept their credit card! I have never been woken up in the middle of the night by a wrong number. (Come to think about it, I don’t have to ever worry about being woken up in the middle of the night by the phone, wrong number or not.) Nor do I have to worry about annoying phone calls from people I do not even like. So as you can see, perhaps I am the one with the advantage.


I arrived back from Kavieng this afternoon. If you remember last month, on the trip back from Kavieng, the top spring of the back springs snapped. I also lost a signal light on that trip. It fell out due to the poor road conditions. This time I only lost one item off of my truck. The right half of my rear bumper fell off. After it fell off, I just removed the wire that was holding my passenger side mirror in place, and switched it to hold the bumper. The quick fix worked and I made it back with the bumper! Oh, how America is wasting money by paving roads. Just cut the trees down and call it a road!

4 comments:

Jerry Bouey said...

Terry, good to see you back, sense of humour and all!

Dave Mallinak said...

We Americans are gluttons. It isn't enough that phone calls interrupt our meals and sleep. We must have a phone while we drive, do our yard work, enjoy a nice dinner out (at Pizza Hut), and literally everywhere we go. But I'm sure it is helpful. After all, if our bumper falls off, we can call a tow truck. And if a pothole caused it, we can call the city and demand that it be fixed. Immediately.

Oh, how inconvenient our conveniences are!

Anonymous said...

Glad your phone service is back. Loved the post!!

Anonymous said...

Well you definitly haven't lost your sense of humor brother. I will be happy to send you my phone as I have recently thought about chucking it off the nearest mountain. Your timing with this last post is quite ironic since I just received a call a few nights ago at 1am from security on campus to say water was spitting out of the water tank in the Tech Building. Now thinking about your post I should have just said to the security guard, "What would you do if you were in Papua New Guinea", but then again he probably would not have been dealing with a 120 gallon, 3 phase electric water heater in the first place. So yes there is definitly a positive side to your phone situation.