So a Plumber I will Be!!! By Edwin

It has been a while since our last blog post (1-2-2017).  So, let’s get caught up on what has been happening since then. To recap; we had decided that it would be best for me to fill the gap at Paruima Mission Academy and teach science for forms 1 & 2. Thankfully many of the kids are in Pathfinders so I could use the honors as teaching materials. As the quarter progressed I ended up taking on form 1 Bible as well. It took some getting used to, trying to figure out how to download information from my head in to theirs… I now have even more respect for those teachers who tried to teach me things in years past. It also gave me opportunity to interact with the kids at the school and learn of their troubles and their joys.

If you Look Closely you can see the pipes from the bathroom

About mid February the Ash family moved to Kaikan for Joy to work in the clinic there. That left the duplex empty at the lower end of campus. We moved out of our room in the girls’ dorm and into the duplex. It was really nice to have a small space that we could call “ours”.

Soon we discovered an issue. The bathroom is on the second floor over the kitchen. The drain pipes from the sink, toilet, and shower went straight through the floor and down through the kitchen counter to the ground. If any water dripped outside the sink it ended up running down and dripping on the kitchen counter. The shower had sun-rotted so just the basin was left. We started out doing bucket baths on the basin till we noticed that water leaked around the drain and dripped guess where, on the clean dishes drying next to the kitchen sink. Then we found out that the pipe from the toilet leaked

Rerouting pipes under the house

 aaannnnnd……. dripped…. we decided maybe it was time to overhaul the bathroom and make sure that “nasty” did not end up on the food prep surfaces. Basically we swapped Kathryn’s room and the bathroom. We reused the pipes and changed the seal on the toilet. YAY!!! No leaks!! And no “nasty” on the kitchen counter!!!! We sealed the seams in the “zinc” flooring so hopefully drips stay right there. The toilet and the sink are in place. Now we just need to get a new bathtub from Georgetown and adjust the walls. We will finish that when we return to Paruima.

Rerouting pipes under the "new" bathroom floor

While we were living in the girls’ dorm we noticed that on laundry days we almost always had trouble running out of water, even if the two 500-gallon water tanks were full. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, given the respective elevations. Steven and I started looking over the water system and concluded that the outlets of the tanks were too small to supply the 2” line that supplies the campus. The outlets from the two tanks came together in a single ¾” pipe. Basically a ¾” pipe supplying a 2” pipe. When there is a high demand on the system, it pulls a vacuum on the upper part of campus. Steven and I set about to remedy the situation. We re-plumbed the tanks, each with a 1 ½” outlet. These come together in a 2” pipe. Now we no longer have issues with the water in the upper part of campus on laundry days when the water tanks are full.

It is nice to be able to step in and help with each of these projects and we praise the Lord for the abilities He has given each of us to do the job He places before us.