Friday, April 27, 2018

Out There with the Beams -- April 2018


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

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