Sunday, May 28, 2017

Out There with the Beams -- May 2017


Dear Friends and family,
Hello again from the jungle metropolis of Santa Cruz, Bolivia! We have had a busy spring with teams and volunteers visiting and plenty of activity here in Santa Cruz.  Our family will be staying in Bolivia this summer, hosting several teams that will be focused both on ministry here in the city and in our rural Agua Yaku water projects.

Our latest team came from C. I. Thornburg, a water utilities supply company based in Kentucky and West Virginia.  A group of seven employees came to help us drill two wells in Pailon, a small town just east of Santa Cruz.  You can check out a video of there week of work and fun at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkFwkksM-VA&t=4s. 

In June, Crossroads, our home church from Kentucky, will be sending a family team to work with Compassion International and with a home for children called Judah Quy, where we will be painting and helping make improvements to the home.  In July, we will be hosting a team from the ABLE ministry that will help us distribute water filters in rural Guarani communities in the department of Tarija, which is south of Santa Cruz.  We will be working jointly with another mission organization that recently finished translating the New Testament into the local Guarani dialect.  We will visit communities where we will share both clean "physical" water and "living water" -- the hope of the Gospel message that is promised through Jesus Christ. 

We are continuing to develop our own brand of water filter, called "AquaSiv," which will replace the Sawyer filter that we are currently using.  The manufacturing in China is slower than anticipated, but it is still on course to be released this year.  We recently completed a video, which you can find at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJxlXVcD18A&t=12s on YouTube.  This video describes our work both drilling water wells and distributing filters and the importance of clean water, and proper hygiene and sanitation for the improvement of health in developing countries such as Bolivia. 

CAFA update:  Vanessa continues to work in the El Alfarero ministries and specifically in the administration of CAFA, the family counseling ministry that helps families break the cycle of domestic violence so prevalent in Latin America.  Please pray for both the counselors and the participants in these programs.  The counseling sessions can be quite emotionally intense as the deal with difficult past and current family situations, and the hard work of true forgiveness and hearing God's voice in the middle of crisis. 

We will soon be enjoying several weeks with our daughter, Luciana, as she has a chance to visit Bolivia several weeks in June. She will be graduating from Dallas Baptist University in December!  Please remember to pray for all our kids: Nat in Colorado, Luciana in Dallas, and Isaiah who will be a high school sophomore here in Santa Cruz in the fall.

Financial needs:  I don't like to focus too much on our financial need as missionaries here in Bolivia, but several key partners have not been able to continue supporting us this year.   We operate under the guidance and supervision of the EFCCM (Evangelical Free Church of Canada), but we are completely responsible for raising the funds for our own family support and for the operating budget for Agua Yaku and CAFA.  We are about $1500 a month short of what we need for our personal support for the year.  Thank you to everyone who has, or is faithfully supporting our work, we could not have been serving here 13 years without your prayers and support.  If you are not already on our team, please prayerfully consider becoming regular monthly supporters of our ministry.  Just follow the links on this email.  It is easy to set up a monthly donation, or a one-time gift, through the EFCA (Evangelical Free Church of America)—for U.S. citizens, or through the EFCCM for Canadians.  If you have any specific questions about our ministry or about how to become a partner please do not hesitate to write or call. 

We hope you have a great summer surrounded by loving family and friends.

Blessings,
Danny and Vanessa

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