|
>>> March 2009
YouTube top featured video! Wow! Today is World Water Day, and YouTube has chosen Charity:Water's video on the C.A.R. as it's top featured video! You can see it on the YouTube homepage, or click here to view it. You can also check out the great article that Charity:Water did on their recent visit with ICDI in the Central African Republic by visiting their website, www.charitywater.org or here's a direct link to just that story.
Reflections On My Last Trip Visiting the CAR this past month was exciting for me as I was able to lead two teams with people who love bringing hope to the hopeless. These were grueling one-week trips with lots of road travel but so rewarding as we watched people who have never understood what was killing their children begin to understand what health, hygiene, and clean water can do to change their lives forever and give their kids a chance to grow up and lead their communities into the future. In the two intervening weeks I was able to help take Doug and Marty Murtoff and my son John to Berberati and get them settled into their routines...well at least get them there to the base camp. Routines is not really a great word for what happens in Africa for the most part. After that I took 5 days to travel around visiting some of the villages and sites where we had drilled wells and talk to the clients. It was exciting to hear for the most part high praise for the work ethic and effectiveness of the teams traveling around to drill new bore holes and repair pumps. The heart ache was all the villages with no clean water or with broken pumps still in so many areas of the CAR. I traveled to some of my old child hood stomping grounds and saw some old friends. Sitting around the campfire talking about what God had been doing in their lives and how they felt hope for the future. As I listened I thought about how far down the country had dropped economically and politically and wondered how they could feel this way? I visited three of the mission stations where I had grown up and served as a missionary and saw the destruction and wondered what God was trying to teach me...
As I sat on the foundation of the house where my brother learned to walk in 1957 I thought back to all that God had brought my parents and my family through. Although there were tough times of armed robberies in our home and evacuations and finally the total destruction of our home in 2003 still what a bright spot we were in today! We now had the opportunity to minister to thousands of people through a radio station that literally reaches the whole country of the CAR! We now have regular impact into over 600 villages through a water maintenance program teaching people how to care for their families. Was it really so terrible that we had lost so much? Had it not brought us more opportunity? How can we continue to impact the future and look to the opportunities that God is giving us to minister to the poor? Will He not bless what we put our hand to because we are investing in the poor as he commanded in the old testament? (Deuteronomy 15:10-11) I believe so!
As I was leaving this part of the country I saw many people, like in the old west, carrying their guns with them. I saw these two young men by one of our wells getting a drink where a large village used to be but since the war only a few people remain. It almost seemed they were protecting the well. I asked them how things were going for them and they said, fine...why would I ask? Why were they carrying home-made shot guns? "Well," they answered "things are a bit different with the possibility of bandits in the area, so we need to protect ourselves. But things are fine and we have food to eat." May I learn to live content with what God has given me and not want more all the time.
|
