Moving Days (or is it Daze...)

AAH! I think that I just experienced a ten minute vacation. I just had a hot shower (!!) and to make it even better I found some relaxing body wash that someone had left behind in the guest house. You can’t really appreciate a hot shower until you have endured at least 5 cold ones –it doesn’t really matter what the temperature is outside. It was a little piece of heaven.
Yesterday was our moving day from one guest house to another (hence the hot shower!). We woke in the morning to streams of rain running off the roof just outside our window and the occasional gust that sprayed us with the fresh rain. So we gave thanks for the rain, because Niamey really needs it and because it brought cool weather, and then asked a selfish prayer that the rain would stop just long enough for us to load the car and make the trips to the next guest house. Praise God for answered prayer, we got here fairly dry. But, that was only the first part of the day, we also had the excitement of trying to get Cole out of a bathroom that he locked himself into. Then we went house hunting…
House hunting is an adventure here, especially because it is rainy season. We hired someone to look for houses for us, so he travels on foot through the neighbourhoods that we are interested in and talks to the guards at the houses that seem to be reasonably well finished (a lot of the houses in the neighbourhoods that we are considering are still under construction). If the house is for rent he gets a look at it and then gives us a call to come and look at it as well. Part of the fun is trying to find the house in a car when he has been circling the neighbourhood on foot. In addition to finding the house the other trick is to get there on washed out roads in an old Toyota Corolla that doesn’t have four wheel drive! Talk about mud bogging! Yesterday we even saw five kids playing in the street in a puddle that was about 20 feet across and about a foot deep. I wish I would have had my camera! (Sorry the pictures are from our other stay here—I’ll try and get some new ones).
We have also seen some interesting houses. One of the first houses that we looked at had a kitchen with two to three inches of water from wall to wall and continued down one hall. The showers can be placed in interesting places as well because most of the locals don’t use a shower curtain. We had a friend tell us that when the guest house that we last stayed at was being built the first shower was installed in such a way that it was located directly over the toilet, so that you had to stand with one foot in the shower and one foot on the floor next to the toilet. (It would have stayed that way too if the inspector hadn’t taken a sledge hammer to the work after telling the crew to change it four or five times!). Please keep praying for us as we search!