Dear Friends and Family,
Merry Christmas! We hope this season
finds you with lots of time to spend with your loved ones. We are
excited that our family will all be together here in Santa Cruz this
year. We want to take this chance to say THANK YOU to
everyone who has supported our ministries with prayer and financial
gifts over the past year. We could not continue working in Bolivia
without your support.
We just finished up with our last
volunteer team of the year. We spent a great week with a Crossroads
Christian Church team from Kentucky (our home church). Half the team
stayed in town with Vanessa and worked at the Ruth
and Noemi Transition House. The other half went with me
and the Agua Yaku
staff out to drill water wells in a Guarani community about eight
hours south of Santa Cruz.
Ministry Updates
Ruth and Noemi: The girls and
staff from Ruth and Noemi are getting settled into their new
home in the El Alfarero ministry building. Vanessa and Dorcas
(the director) are preparing to receive several new girls in December
and January. It is a tight fit, but the new apartment has a capacity
for up to eleven women and five babies. Ruth and Noemi has
been fortunate enough to be supported by several large donations over
the past couple of years, but now they need to grow their monthly
support base so they are always sure of steady support for their
monthly budget. The girls continue to make jewelry and tee-shirts to
help pay for their room and board. Soon they will be volunteering in
the El Alfarero cafeteria, which will be serving between 500
and 1000 students each day.
Agua Yaku: We are changing
things up a bit in Agua Yaku. While we will continue to drill
water wells, we will begin to focus more specifically on providing
access to clean water and improving health through HWTS (household
water treatment and safe storage) and WASH (water, sanitation, and
hygiene) programs. Because of a number of limitations (financial and
technological) we have not been able to drill wells in every
community where clean water is needed. In many communities where it
is not possible to drill wells, the residents have to drink water
collected from rain water or other surface sources that are
unsanitary. The World Health Organization has determined that clean
water can reduce water-related deaths by 21%, sanitation (latrines)
can reduced water-related deaths by 37.5%, and hygiene (hand washing)
can reduce water-related deaths by 35%. Improvements in all three
areas could practically eliminate water-related deaths!
Through a new filter technology we hope
to place a water filter system in each home that does not have access
to a clean water source. Sawyer
(http://www.sawyer.com/sawyersaves/default.html)
has developed a hollow-fiber membrane filter that can filter up to
500 gallons of potable water a day (cleaner than
U.S. bottled water) and is guaranteed for 1,000,000 gallons. This is
a huge leap in filter technology. Would you like to help Agua Yaku
provide a family with clean water for life. For $100 we can provide
a family with a Sawyer filter and training on how to use and
maintain the filter, and training on how to improve their family's
health through sanitation and hygiene. We have a big goal: we would
like to place 100,000 filters in Bolivia in the next five years,
which would provide clean water for around 1,000,000 people! How
many families would you like to give clean water to for life? As
we implement this program we will continue to work through local
churches, pastors, and missionaries to make sure the poor are
ministered to and that everyone hears about the love and truth in
Christ.
Beams
Family Support: While Vanessa and I would much rather raise
support for our projects, we also have to raise support for our own
salary. We are a bit low on our monthly pledges and for 2013 we need
an additional $1000 in monthly support to help cover our salary,
insurance, travel, etc. It would mean so much to us if you could
give $25, $50, or $100 or more a month to help support our work here
in Bolivia.
If
you would like to donate to Agua Yaku, Ruth & Noemi,
or to our support account, please follow the links in this email. If
that is too confusing, give us a call at: 011-591-3351-1087 or
contact us by email at: beamsclan@gmail.com
and we will walk you through it. We wish each and everyone of you
the best during the Christmas season and the coming new year.
Blessings,
Danny and Vanessa
Danny and Vanessa
“Guide
me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope
is in you all day long.” Psalms 25:5
