Okay, last week I started going through the top six unexpected things that have happened to me since PNG became my home. Here is the conclusion:

3. I never thought I would regularly cook from scratch.

You can ask my college roommates what kind of a talented cook I was back in the day and they would sing my praises. While they both worked diligently (and masterfully) in the kitchen, I was assigned the very technical tasks of grating cheese or slicing tomatoes. I excelled, but not at actually cooking anything.

First attempt at homemade subway rolls!

In PNG you can get all the basic foods you need to cook from scratch, along with all the foods already made. Problem is we live on a very tight budget over there and the already-made food shipped from Asia or Australia is expensive. It’s much more economical to bake your own bread and make your own soup. So I learned and I love it. My culinary flower blossomed just a little later than my roommates’!

2. I never thought I would say yes to a marriage proposal while delusional.

My husband Brian is quick at making decisions and he rarely ever doubts himself. I’m the opposite. I agonize and procrastinate all decisions, whether it’s as simple as what to eat for dinner or as overwhelming as who I’m going to marry. I think that’s why I had malaria when Brian proposed. God knew I needed to be in an altered state of mind to make the absolute best decision I’ve ever made. Otherwise I was on a clear road to screwing the whole thing up.

My father-in-law loves to remind my husband that I was delusional when I said yes to his proposal. I had been so careful about taking my prophylaxis, but decided to stop once I traveled up to the highlands where the malaria mosquitoes are few and far between. Six days before I was supposed to meet Brian in Australia I became very ill. It was clearly a fever but it had no other signs of being malaria, which comes and goes in waves. Not wanting to be a wimp, I kept away from the clinic and assumed I would get better shortly. Hindsight being 20/20 I now know I cycled at least three times before traveling. Malaria gets worse with each cycle, so by the time I arrived in Australia I was bad off. I had several nights of seeing monsters crawling down the bedroom walls and I was, simply put, miserable. Shortly after arriving, Brian called a taxi to take me to the emergency room. In good taste, the taxi driver commented that I looked like death and followed that up with a story about his wife’s fight with malaria that ended in a coma. Thanks for that.

Our engagement photo… I was feeling better!

Despite the physical discomfort of that time God used the malaria to bring Brian and me back together. I was having a bit of a meltdown about how serious our relationship was getting and I thought I wasn’t ready for marriage. I was a knife’s edge away from breaking up with Brian and returning to PNG single, but we bonded that night in the emergency room. Despite the malarial cobwebs, my mind cleared and I remembered why I chose to be in a serious relationship with him; he was and is perfect for me.

When he proposed a week later in a very simple and straightforward way, I felt God’s presence. It took me a second, but once I said yes a weight came off my shoulders and I knew that my bout with malaria may have been the best thing that’s happened to me.

1. I never thought I would fall into a pit toilet.

Bathrooms in PNG are pit toilets found outside, far from houses. This means I will inevitably have to go to the bathroom several times throughout the night even though I can make it clean through when I’m in a house with a bathroom right there; don’t even get me started on how many times I have to go when it’s raining. It also means I have to be “on guard” for snakes, spiders, and other creepy critters. I learned the hard way that it also means I need to pay attention to the general state of the outhouse structure; is it new or is it rotting to the point of falling apart?

The inside of a fairly new PNG pit toilet.

During a survey my fellow female teammates and I would rate the pit toilets in each village we visited. The first person to go would give the toilet a 1-5 star rating. The very last village we visited had a toilet that didn’t even really rank. It was clearly old and rotting, but that’s the only place we had been advised to go. In the morning I was the first person up, so I made my way to the outhouse alone. I snuck past several houses where the people were just starting to wake up and found the dilapidated structure. I remember contemplating that I should try to think light thoughts to make myself less weighty, but I didn’t seriously consider the possibility that the floor would give. It gave.

As I climbed out of the pit toilet, I considered my life and the decisions I had made that led to that moment. It was gross and tears may have been involved (I really don’t remember as I’ve blocked the details of that morning from my mind), but in the end I wouldn’t trade my life in PNG for a life anywhere else. Not one of these six unexpected results of my life would make me want to give up and live back in the US. I believe God gives us a heart for the work He puts in front of us and though it’s not always easy and I don’t ever want to fall into a pit toilet again, He gives us the ability to thrive!