you might be a missionary wife and mom in Ukarumpa if...

~ you walk through a ziploc forest while crossing your back deck to hang laundry

~ you hear thunder on a laundry day (typically five out of seven days a week) and feel a sudden surge of panic and run outside to complete the "PNG laundry dash"

~ you go outside your house in the morning to warm up

~ you are surprisingly not at all alarmed while outside hanging laundry by the loud crackling sounds from your national neighbor's HUGE bush fire in your adjacent yard. yes, huge fire in your adjacent yard

~ you are happy to hear the Ukarumpa horns blast at 7:45am, 8:00am, 10:00am, 10:15am, 12:00pm, 12:45pm, 1:00pm, 3:00pm, 3:15pm and 5:00pm because you always know what time it is without glancing at a watch!

~ you get excited when you see cocoa powder (priced at about $8) at the SIL member store, because this means a somewhat less expensive chocolate fix than the Cadbury bars that practically SCREAM your name while checking out

~ you pay at least twice, if not three times, the US dollar price for everything on the SIL member store's shelves, but not a red cent for the free-of-charge-front-doorstep-same-day delivery service!

~ you laugh when you see the price of minced beef (that's hamburger for you American peeps) is more than $10 a pound and opt to feed your family more empty carbs yet again at dinner without even a twinge of guilt

~ you walk uphill both ways EVERYWHERE you walk (which is everywhere!)

~ the squirrels you were accustomed to seeing in your front yard in SC have been replaced by rats

~ you happily separate your garbage into food scraps, burnable and nonburnable waste

~ you accidentally smell your food scraps in their bucket and realize you have a science experiment growing in your pantry, and proceed to take it outside to dump into a hole hidden in the banana tree grove in your back yard

~ you call your neighbor and ask her to meet you at the garbage burning pit, where you proceed to play with matches, all in the name of adult conversation

~ your garbage men (most likely the happiest looking garbage men on planet earth!) pick up your nonburnable waste once a week on Tuesday morning with a tractor and a trailer

~ to avoid paying $3 for one can of green beans you wake up at six am and walk ten minutes uphill both ways to an open-air market, return home more than a half an hour later to soak the said green beans in purified bleach water, and about an hour and a half after you started this fiasco begin popping and stringing the beans you labored so viciously over (all the while, feeling quite proud of the fact that you are feeding your family organic vegetables)

~ the bottom of your children's feet are darker black than the soil they ran barefooted in during PE time at high school

~ you drag yourself outta bed freezing cold at 6 am (opening doors to let in the warm air!) dressing in multiple layers to warm up, slowly remove these layers throughout the day as you began to sweat into the early afternoon hours (by this time opening windows to allow the warm air from the oven that has been baking your bread, granola and dinner -dern carbs!!- to escape), and once again began replacing the layers to fight off the chill that creeps into the house at dusk (closing all windows and doors and grateful for the warmth of the kitchen from dinner prep!)

~ you wake up in total panic at 5:30am to the ear-piercing sound of PNG cicadas, because in your sleep you were dreaming the home security alarm had been set off by intruders

~ you wake up at 3:30am to the sound of your national neighbor's rooster who hasn't figured out it isn't time to wake up the white-skinned-neighbors yet

~ you wake up at 12:30am to the sound of the Guard Dog security guards trying to get their four-wheel drive vehicle up the hill in your backyard

~ you consistently are forced to take cold or lukewarm showers on overcast and rainy days

~ the thousands (slight exaggeration) of ants crawling through your sugar bowl are smaller and lighter in color than the crystals of sugar in your sugar bowl

~ you can kill a roach without screaming like a little girl

~ you have roach motels in a minimum of three undisclosed locations in every room if your house

~ while taking in your laundry you remove a beetle the size of your great-grandfather's overly sized nose from your 12 year old's green t-shirt

~ you spend most of your days cooking, cleaning, cooking again, doing laundry, killing bugs, cooking again and yet you feel like your life's purpose is being fulfilled, because you are doing it all while supporting God's great work of Bible translation!  

"Work willingly at whatever you do, as though you were working for the Lord rather than for people." Colossians 3:23 NLT