FIRE!!!

Fire. It´s a really simple basic thing, that can be used for heat, cooking, hanging around singing songs, just relaxing in front of. Well here in Chile, fire is used for cooking and most importantly to me Heat. Growing up we had a woodstove and a fire place and I would watch my dad start fires on cold winter nights, sometime I would even help. In high school we´d go camping and I loved to start fires. So coming to Chile I thought having a fire would be great thing.
Nobody told me however, that in Chile most of the time all the wood is wet. It´s very difficult to start a fire with wet wood. Coming to Quemchi I made it a point to cut the firewood into small pieces and even cut some kindling. Once the fire is started there is no problem. Saturday night we returned from a good trip to Castro to find the stove almost cold, which was fine, I needed to clean out the ashes anyway. After I had cleaned out the stove I was ready to make Fire. After an hour I was still waiting to make Fire. All my hard work was for nothing everything was damp or wet. The paper would burn, the tissues would burn, the paper bags would burn, I even managed to fill the house up with smoke, yet no fire.
As it got later into the night, with no fire and the house got colder and I got angrier still no fire. I called the land lord and told him the problem, however, I don´t know enough spanish to understand what he was telling me to do and eventually he hung up on me.
After 3 hours still no fire. We saw smoke from the neigbhors and decided that we would go over and get some of their hot coals to start our fire. Putting all my pride on the shelf I went with frying pan and metal spoon to get fire. We met, we look fire back and...still no fire would light. We gave up after 4 hours of trying and then suddenly...fire appeared out of know where in the stove.
The lesson we learned, is that we needed to meet the neighbors because they are new and are a christian family. God has his plans and purposes, which many times we will never understand. He does what he wants when He wants.