Dear Friends and family,
Greetings from Bolivia.
This is Danny writing this month. We are just finishing up a busy season
of spring teams and a productive visit with our EFCCM mission director from
Canada. I can’t believe that in just one
month’s time we will be heading back to the U.S. for a two-month whirlwind tour
through the towns of our supporting churches and mission partners. If you would like us to host us on our
journey or would like us to share about our ministry in your church or small
group, please write and or give us a call.
We would love to see you in person and share how God is blessings so
many people in Bolivia.
Do you sometimes actually SEE and FEEL how God is partnering
with you in ministry? It doesn’t happen
to me all the time, but it is so encouraging when it does. I want to share two little vignettes of how
God has recently “shown up” in the middle of our Agua Yaku activities. I’m the first to admit that I don’t always
plan with the greatest care to detail, and sometimes the lack of careful
planning might even reflect negatively in my ministry results. Several weeks ago, I took a team of 12 guys
from Crossroads Church on a five-day motorcycle adventure through the Andes
mountains. We had six motorcycles, two
follow vehicles, and a trailer full buckets, water filters, and Clean Water
Stations. We had a great time visiting schools along the route where we
installed water filters and trained the students and teachers in the health
benefits of drinking clean filtered water, hand washing, and proper sanitation
habits. The plan was to give free
filters to all the schools and to sell additional filters to as many families
as we could at a deeply subsidized cost.
We will even accept handmade crafts from families who do not have any
cash. Despite a few minor motorcycle mishaps and route-finding issues, we were
on target to visit all the schools we had planned out for the week.
On our fourth day out, we stopped for the night in a town
called Aiquile. Even though Aiquile is a
good size regional town that I knew has huge water problems, I also knew we
would be exhausted at the end of a rough week and I had decided earlier not to
tackle the water problems of Aiquile on this trip. Besides, Friday was going to be our longest
day in the saddle. Our plan was to get
up early Friday morning and make a quick stop at one small school along our
route back to Santa Cruz. I thought it would be too large of a task to
try and take on the whole of Aiquile’s water problem. Well, I should have known that God loves
everyone in Aiquile and He wants them all to have clean water. As we were prepping the bikes, getting ready
to leave on Friday morning, I walked across the plaza to take a few pictures of
the modern Catholic church sitting catty-corner to our hotel. The church doors were open for early morning
mass. Two ladies were on the sidewalk,
ready to sell flowers to parishioners as soon as mass was over. One of ladies, Rosemery, was watching me
taking pictures and curiously asked what our crew was doing in Aiquile. I told her about the motorcycle route and
about the water filters. She immediately
said the water quality in Aiquile was terrible, that many people get sick from
the water, and she wanted to know if she could buy one of the filters? I said of course she could buy one. Then she asked if I had free filters for the
schools. “Yes,” I said. Rosemery said she was a teacher as well as a
flower seller. She said Aiquile has 12
schools in town and many more in the rural villages nearby. I explained that we would be getting on the
road right after breakfast, but that if she could call her friends I would give
a filter to any school who had a representative in front of the hotel within an
hour. She excitedly packed up her
flowers and disappeared into the back streets of Aiquile.
It turned out that there was a national teacher’s strike
called for on that Friday. Normally, all
the school directors would have been busy at work in their respective schools
on a Friday morning, but because they were preparing for a march through town
later that day. All 12 school directors
had the morning off. Word of the water
filters spread quickly through town and by the time we got back from breakfast
in the market, there was a small crowd of people milling around on the street
in front of our hotel. We ended up doing
a training session and a bit of evangelism right on the street. In the end, we gave filters to the directors
of 18 different schools, to the director of the local hospital, and we sold an
additional 30 or so filters to individuals.
God knew Aiquile needed water filters and He wasn’t going to let us
leave town without giving them away.
After our impromptu training and filter sales convention, the directors
joined the parade of teachers marching around the plaza shouting for better
salaries.
Okay, I have to tell one more story about how tuned-in God
is to the needs around us. Some of you
may remember when Agua Yaku distributed about 700 water filters during a huge
flood in the spring of 2014. Many of you
reading this contributed to this impactful effort. Well, the floods are back in 2018. While not as severe as they were in 2014, they
have still displaced thousands of families in the eastern lowlands in the
departments of Beni and Pando. Not to
my credit, I have not reached out to flood victims with water filters this year
like I should. Instead, I have stuck to
my own plans and program, drilling water wells and coordinating volunteer
teams. God still knows the needs of
these flooded out families. If I won’t
take the filters to them, then He will bring them to me.
Last week while I was working in the shop behind my office, I
heard someone rattling the fence and shouting, wanting me to come to the
gate. I almost ignored the interruption,
thinking it was just a salesman I didn’t want to talk to, but they were
persistent and didn’t go away so I finally put down my work and trudged up to
the front of the house to see what was going on. There where six or eight young men out on the
street asking neighbors for old shoes, clothes, food—any donations they could
take away with them. The two young men
at my gate, Gabriel and Juan, were in their late teens or early twenties. Gabriel explained that they were from a
flooded community near San Borja in the department of Beni. He said they were part of 25 families who had
lost their homes, crops, and livestock and that they were all living together
under a single “tinglado,” a covered
roof located on the only high spot in their community. Even though the flooding began in February,
Gabriel explained that the water was just now finally beginning to recede. He
said they had lost everything in the flood waters and they hadn’t yet received
any government help. Desperate, the
families decided to send the boys out on a mission to Santa Cruz (at least 20
hours away by boat and bus), to see if they could bring back some help.
I told Gabriel about our water filters. He said they were in desperate need of clean
water but that he didn’t even know that such water filters existed. I quickly set up a water filter bucket in the
back yard and trained Gabriel and Juan how to use it. I sent the boys on their way with five
filters, and with the promise for more if they needed them. So, let’s summarize what God did. What
appeared to have been random door-to-door begging was nothing of the sort. Over two million people live in thousands of
neighborhoods across Santa Cruz. These
boys, who desperately needed to find water filters for their community (and who
didn’t even know water filters existed), knocked on the only door in Santa Cruz
with water filters. No, not so random
after all.
Pray that these 25 families from San Borja, and the 1000s
more flood victims, can quickly recover from the flooding. Pray, as well, that Christ’s love will shine
brightly upon them and that they will come to know His saving grace through
these tragic circumstances. If you would
like to designate a special gift for flood victims in Bolivia this year, please
let me know. $50 will provide a filter
for a family in need, $500—ten families, $5000—100 families.
Blessings,
Danny
