In Which We Accidentally the Truck

We accidentally what? The truck.

[Warning: rather long post.] Its been a flurry of activity the last two weeks here. Last week, as I mentioned, I was manning the fort as everyone else was at week-long seminars put on by various NGO's. That week went just fine. Then we pulled into a three-day weekend for Armed Forces day or something. That meant a little bit of housekeeping. I spent the whole day Saturday with the boys in the dorm as we pulled out everything for some good ol' fashioned cleaning. And when I say everything I mean everything. The girls were all watching and making fun of all the odds and ends that the boys were hoarding in there. Water bottles, toys, trinkets, bottle caps of all sorts (which are kind of used like currency around here) were found in their bunks as we cleaned out all the junk.

But the girls got their turn on the Monday holiday when Victor went through their house with them. They got the same treatment in their house while I got to do some much needed yardwork with the boys. I wanted to be there cleaning out the girls house with them, but lets face it, girls can be a little, ummm, touchy when it comes to going through their stuff. And I don't mean stuff in like all their clothes and things. I mean weird stuff. One girl was storing dozens and dozens of old toilet paper rolls. One girl had at least over a hundred pen caps that she had collected. Another yet had a backpack full of not books but pencil shavings. And those were just the girls over age 16 (seriously). The girls did not take to well to the non-stop shame and laughter that resulted from all the boys seeing tons of junk in their trunk because, well, girls.

After that, I spent about two days washing and sorting the old clothes and packaging them up do donate somewhere else (hundreds of kids just down the hill in the jungle would kill to wear good condition 3rd hand clothes). Because of those two days my house still smells “mountain fresh”, or however detergent is supposed to smell. I'm just glad that the detergent didn't smell like cake or cheeseburgers because boy would that make me hungry.

But today's post isn't about what I've been up to. Today's post is for the edification of all you out there. As one of the things I do a lot here at the orphanage is teach and give school lessons, I thought it about time a prepare a lesson for all of you faithful readers out there. This lesson addresses one of my grammatical / literary pet peeves. And I don't even like grammar, but this is still an annoyance of mine. Today, you are all going to learn about irony.

First, let us discover through some brief examples what irony is and, more importantly, is not. There are lots of types of irony, such as Socratic irony. This is when somebody pretends to be stupid and trap somebody else who doesn't yet know they're really the oness that are stupid. This would be like me asking, “Hey America, if we don't have any money left, why don't we just print more money?” Another example of irony is tragic irony. This is where a fictional character makes a decision that the audience knows will clearly end in disaster and so they scream at the TV as if the character can hear them saying, “No, don't do it [somebody from Twilight]. You know in your heart that [some other person from Twilight] is not right for you and you need to be with [yet another idiot person from Twilight].” Am I right, my 14 year-old girl demographic?

What we are focusing on today is situational irony. Lets have some examples first of what is not ironic.

Coincidence

A coincidence is two or more things that happen that are unrelated in causality. We have a fairly common example here at the orphanage with clothes. Because things get donated in bunches, its fairly common to see two or eight people wearing the same shirt on any given day.

Twinsies! (I'm the one on the left)

Here, Tercia and I are wearing the same t-shirt we got during a Christmas program last year. It would be wrong of me to say, “Oh look, Tercia. We're wearing the same shirt. How ironic.” This is coincidence, not irony. What would make the situation ironic is if I had decided to buy a different t-shirt that I was sure nobody else would have in order to be unique, and she also decided to buy a t-shirt with the same motive of uniqueness without knowing I had bought the shirt. The first day we both debut our new t-shirts discover the other has done the same would then be ironic because in our quest to be unique we ended up becoming more alike (you hear me, hipsters).

Synchronicity

No, not the album(s) by The Police. Synchronicity, as coined be Carl Jung, is two events statistically likely or unlikely to occur together in which, when occurring at the same time, have a perceived significance or “deeper meaning”. This is the secular term for what most of you are probably familiar with as Divine Providence.

For example, in cleaning out the dormitories this weekend we got rid of a lot of sheets for the beds that were no longer functional or just way too torn and tattered. We had no new sheets to give out, its just the old ones were unusable and needed to be trashed. When THE NEXT DAY a truck from World Vision comes by and drops by 5 huge boxes of sheets and blankets you would be incorrect to say, “Oh, how ironic of them.”

But would be correct to say, “Awesome! Divine Providence!”. (But only because if you were to say, “Awesome! Synchronicity.” you risk Sting appearing and singing Every Breath You Take.)

Irony

It's time to actually talk about irony. The key thing about situational irony is that it depends on causality. You try to avoid something and it happens in spite of yourself. Like a guy who is afraid of drowning so he takes swimming lessons and ends up drowning during the lesson, where as if he had just stayed home he wouldn't have drowned. Or that if Tammy Wynette, the country singer, had never sang and became famous for the song "Stand By Your Man" she never would have met and married (and later left) George Jones. Need another example?

This happened.

This week the truck got in an accident. Coincidental? Yes. There's a lot of people on the road here and statistically these things happen. What was nice was that we had just very recently paid accident insurance for the year. That makes it fall under that category of synchronicity / Divine Providence.

What tips the scales is that the reason the truck was in an accident is it was out doing extra work hauling goods to help earn back all the money we had spent on accident insurance. How ironic...

The truck is/was brand new and we practically drove it out of the factory two years ago when we bought it. This is the first accident to happen to it and thankfully the driver and passengers were okay. The truck had been going out the last week hauling goods to and fro to raise money. At the time I think it was carrying corn. The truck usually stays in around the orphanage and does work or errands or grocery shopping or trips to the dump (the “dump” is a ravine in the jungle near here). Its a blessing everyone was not hurt and, while it obviously sucks, we know God will get us through it.

The big obstacle is the insurance was not full coverage and only covers damage to the car we hit. The blessing is that we've looked most the damage over and it all appears to be structural, just a crumpled cab. We've been banging out dents and going away at it. Still it's gonna set us back a bit --- we'll need to replace the driver-side door, window, and windshield/screen.

We are currently figuring out how much we'll need to cover the door and glass. It won't be a fortune, but it won't be cheep. I will try my best to get more details out over our repairs in the coming days. This feels like a shameless plug, but a necessary one at that: If you feel like you would like to give to help support the repairs, we have our brand-new Evanjafrica Paypal account on the side you can click on. Once we figure out an estimate of the repairs I'll post it here for y'all to see. And as always, check in the mail works just as well.

And getting the Paypal account started last month to aid in the efforts would be an example of synchronicity Divine Providence.