Scintilla: A highly irregular Sunday night

Okay, thank you universe. I get it. I realise my mistake.

I now know you shouldn’t tempt fate by describing a ‘typical’ Sunday night, as if its little eccentricities are the most amusing of curve balls that life could throw at you. Because the very next Sunday night YOUR HOUSE WILL BE FLOODED!

Our evening routine with our neighbours (English lessons, singing, dancing, drawing, the kids cooking us all dinner) was underway as usual last night. Until I heard a voice saying ‘Joey, Joey’ and felt a little hand tugging at my arm, drawing my attention to the fact that putrid brown water was flooding in underneath one of our side doors.

It had been raining for a while but it never occurred to me that the rain outside was in the process of flooding our neighbourhood and causing everyone else’s mud to flow down to our house. With water flowing in from two side doors, and our front courtyard rapidly becoming a swimming pool, I must confess I had a little First World panic (you know the type, when you run around freaking out about a situation over which you have no control, hoping someone else will catch on and share the panic with you).

Before long our bathroom, kitchen and dining room was under about a foot of rising water. The rest of the house – our loungeroom and bedrooms – is a step above. That’s a step I am incredibly grateful for, because we were about 10cm away from having floating beds (okay, might be a bit of an exaggeration but this was a Sunday night after all. Sunday nights are meant for cups of tea and watching whatever English telemovie is on ABC).

Thankfully it turns out that our posse of kids, aside from being resourceful cooks, are also the (junior) Timorese version of the SAS. There were kids in our dining room filling up garbage bins with water to try and make the level go down, there were kids wading around in the courtyard collecting rubbish so it wouldn’t hurt anyone… there were even kids providing light entertainment on the verandah, in the form of Shakira renditions.

When my panic and the water finally started to subside, the kids were already in recovery mode. Our place went from being partially submerged under thick brown water to spick and span in the space of a couple of hours. If the East Timor government wants some poster boys and girls for the nation’s work ethic, I know where to find them.

When you put yourself in situations where you have to depend on the kindness of strangers (or in this case, a crack team of super-capable children you hardly know), it never ceases to amaze me how quickly people come to your aid. Especially when they have so little to give themselves. And if you’re lucky, afterwards you can all eat icecream together.