Number one on the list of challenges is just staying warm. Our house has two wood stoves, and numerous loose fitting doors and windows for cold air to enter. There was a large pile of wood here when I arrived, and I joyfully split and burned it at a merry rate, keeping the house toasty. As the cold nights continued, and the pile began to dwindle, we began to realize that the wood pile, which our Chilean hosts has assured us would last for the rest of the winter, was not going to make it until the weather got warmer. It seems that their calculation was made with the average Chilean's tolerance for cold in mind, and our American ideas of how warm a house should be meant that we were using a lot more wood than they did. OK. We can slow down our consumption a bit, but we still need to order more wood because spring is not here yet. (There is a whole other discussion that could happen at this point about energy consumption and global warming, but let's leave that for another day and stay focused on the personal here)No problem, I thought, Rodrigo left me the phone number of Señor Miguel. I'll call him and order some more wood...except that when I called he told me that he had no more wood. He was done for the season. So, I began to look around and found a place selling wood on one of the main streets in Chillán. I talked to the guy and he told me that he had wood, but that it was not completely dry. I figured that I still had some dry wood from before, and anyway, it would be spring, and warm, soon so I went ahead and bought some wood, which they delivered and stacked that afternoon.
I don't feel like there was any bad faith. I mean, the guy warned me that the wood was 'not completely dry', but a lot of it was really wet inside. It was basically impossible to start a fire with the new stuff, although if you got a nice hot fire going with the older, drier wood, it was possible to burn the new stuff. Each day became a new experiment in crafting subtle blends of my dwindling supply of dry wood with the slowly drying new wood. I began splitting the wet wood into smaller pieces and laying it out in the driveway on the infrequent sunny days. The neighbors must have thought I was crazy. I started stressing out about wood and fire and keeping the house warm.So I had to ask for help. I asked Luz María, our wonderful local support person, to look around for another source of dry wood. Catherine called our friend Pam to see if the folks she was living with, Don Arturo and Señora Luz, had a good wood contact. Catherine and I are going to walk by a wood seller that she has seen up by her school this afternoon. One way or another we will find enough wood to get us through to warmer weather. At home this was something I would have just handled myself because I know how to navigate in that world, but here I have had to let go of PRIDE and ask for help, and that might be the biggest challenge of all for me.
We take so much for granted in our comfortable lives back home. When problems arrise, we typically know how to find solutions. Living abroad, that sense of competance can be stripped away. Matters that are almost automatic back home can take up huge amounts of time and energy here. On the other hand, many things that consume our lives back home have almost no significance here. So, I take it day to day here, approaching each day's 'learning opportunities' with humility and humor, learning to live outside my comfort zone.
