I came back to the Hernandez home from the Nehemiah Center late afternoon and gathered a load of white laundry.
But the Hernandez lavanderia (washing machine) was half full of water and clothes, lid open, not running.
Pastor Ricardo came out of his home office and said, “We have a problem with the water. There was no water last night, and we have enough for showers, but probably not for laundry. Is it OK?”
“Of course,” I said.
The Hernandez home has two water tanks, an elevated blue one and a larger black one at ground level. Water arrives at the house only between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m., when the tanks are filled. The Hernandezes have their own pump and use water from these tanks throughout the day.
Some Managua barrios have better water service than this; some worse.
The first five years in this house, the Hernandez family did not need a water tank. But then water service became unreliable, and they installed tanks. Their neighbors also have tanks.
Sitting with my computer as I wait for dinner, I wonder about my sense of “normal.”
What is normal—my nonstop Pella, Iowa, water supply or the Managua, Nicaragua, intermittent supply?
I find no answer, but two stories float to mind—one from Managua, one from Phoenix.
…
Last week in Managua, when I greeted long-term North American missionary Eric Loftsgard, after a year away, my second sentence was, “I’d like to ask you some follow-up questions. When would that work for you?”
Then I apologized, embarrassed. “What a North American I am!” (Nicaraguan culture normally has a lengthy greeting and personal conversation before getting down to business.)
“That’s OK,” Eric quipped. “I’m dual-tolerant.”
…
In Phoenix 2002, two years after my brother and niece had vanished from earth together in a Firestone-tire-caused rollover, I asked my sister-in-law how she and her three surviving children were doing.
She paused, then said, “Fine. For the new normal, we are doing just fine.”
…
Normal? Hmmm. . . .
Perhaps it doesn’t exist. Perhaps it changes with time and place.
Meanwhile, Ricardo has just told me he discovered the larger, black tank has enough water for laundry after all.
I think I have been dual-tolerant--and now my new normal just got better.
When I worked in change management for a Fortune 500, one of our tasks was developing greater resilience in employees in preparation for very large shifts in their lives at work. Resilience meant, basically, accelerating the speed at which they were able to adjust their expectations from "this" as normal to "that" as normal. Most of that adjustment acceleration depended on how much control they felt when faced with a change - was it done to them, or were they able to control some/all of what happened and when? Greater control in shaping the New Normal -- or parts of it, at least -- meant a quicker accommodation to that version of Normal. For what it's worth...
ReplyDeletebtw, your photos are excellent.
ReplyDeleteMaureen,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the insights into normalcy. And your kudo on the photos is comforting--we'll be using some in the book, and I'm a little insecure about that. I'm more at home with word pictures that photos.