When we arrived in the Philippines, one of the first things we were told was “never judge a missionary by the things they say while driving in Manila,” and while it didn’t make any sense at the time, it didn’t take long at all to understand what they meant. There were no familiar fast flowing freeways in Manila, so going from any one place to another involved taking miles of clogged city roads. Major roads were often two lanes in each direction, but where space allowed, the road widened to three lanes. Traffic would quickly expand into the third lane in an effort to get ahead in the painfully slow congestion, but a few hundred feet ahead, a neighborhood or bridge would collapse the road down to two lanes again, forcing the traffic to merge, and creating even more congestion in the process. Continue reading “Getting around in Manila”
Getting around in Manila
lines running down the yard where the lawnmower wheels had sunk deep into the soil. When we first purchased the home we were heading into summertime and our focus was on a few high priority repairs, so we decided to leave the yard as a project for the next year. Going through fall and into the winter rains, we watched as the backyard once again became a soggy mess. When heavy rains came through, the water would flood the yard, drain across our patio and spill down our driveway – a less than ideal scenario. Given the appearance of gravel lining the patio and several clean out drains, I was aware that there was a French drain present, albeit not functioning. As I performed an investigatory dig of the drain, I found that there was indeed a pipe, but drainage fabric had never been installed so the gravel had been filled in with silt ending the drains usefulness. During that dig I also discovered the presence of several sprinkler heads and PVC water lines within the trench making the project even more difficult. Using a shovel and brute force were out, and using a hand trowel and weeding fork to delicately excavate the trench were in.
excavation of the existing drain. The only problem was I had no idea where the drain lines ran to carry the water to an outlet on the street. My only solution was to continue excavating and see what I would find. In the first week digging out the gravel and pipe next to the patio there were no surprises, but as I started into the second week, there were plenty. There was an unexpected drain line that ran to the neighbors fence, complete with a clean out that had been buried under six inches of soil. The drain line that ran down towards the street had another clean out that was buried under four inches of soil. And at the other end of the patio was a completely different drain pipe that had been laid directly into the soil and was broken in several places. I had planned to add a drain line to that side of the patio and had questioned how I was going to connect the new line to a drain, but to my delight, the very end of the broken drain line was intact and did in fact connect to an existing drain. By the end of the second week, I had finished digging out the trenches for the new drain lines, pulled all of the old pipe out of the ground, and was ready to start installing the new drain.
a divergent life 