Thanksgiving and Earthquake

Well as some of you are probably aware Thursday was American thanksgiving day, and as a fair proportion of the missionaries here in Ukarumpa are of US decent thanksgiving is celebrated here too. It would appear that being a single American guy would be kind of nice this time of year, Chris my roommate has been invited to 4 different thanksgiving meals this year, not a bad effort. However the celebrations are not restricted to Americans, I went to a lovely thanksgiving dinner on Thursday at Tiffany's place along with 9 others. There were 7 Americans, 2 Aussies and myself (a New Zealander). A grand time was had by all, we had plenty of yummy food and none of the strange American dishes like sweet potato with marshmallows on top (sorry to any of you who may be reading this who gave me any of this in Vancouver, you are still all very nice people despite your eating habits). While we waited for the main course to settle we all shared something we are thankful for and then we had a good old sing-a-long. Then came dessert, now this time Americans have got it right and us New Zealanders could learn a thing or two. Pumpkin pie is the business, a great use for the humble pumpkin.

Just as I was getting in to the van to go down to thanksgiving the earth started shaking. It didn't take too long to establish that I was experiencing an earthquake, and a much more significant one than I had previously experienced. The earthquake lasted much longer than any of the other quakes that occur every now and again over here, I would guess it lasted a good 30 seconds or so. The reported size of the quake was 6.7 and was centred 100km off the coast from Lae, so it was a fair way away from Ukarumpa. Still it was violent enough to put a large leak in our water tank as well as another 8 tanks around Ukarumpa. The repair dudes replaced our tank yesterday and then finished plumbing it in this morning, so now we just have to wait for more rain to fill it up, and based on the weather pattern we have been experiencing lately I expect that it should only take a couple of days to fill up the tank. It certainly appears that we are moving in to the rainy season, every afternoon it starts raining some time between 1 and 4 and keeps raining most of the night; rather inconvenient when I forget to take my umbrella to work after lunch.