Day 3: Patience, Purpose and Provdence

Ana, With Her Son, and Their New Filter

The best laid plans...Don't count your chickens before they are hatched... One thing that you have to know when doing mission work is this...NOTHING ever goes as planned. For those of you that don't know, the main purpose of our team is to train, install, and deliver water filters to people, so that they have safe clean drinking water. Needless to say, the one thing we need to effectively do this is...water filters. We planned the day to the letter and guess what wasn't there when we arrived today...go ahead guess...yep, water filters.

So we have 11 people on the team and 8 of them are "A" type people, so as you can imagine this went over about as well
as the weather in Brighton on Sunday. Do you know what is awesome though? Instead of anger, frustration, fighting and freaking out; we had calm, cool, collected and control. We prayed, and banded together to have an incredible day.

We split the people into groups of adults and kids, and had health and hygiene lessons tailored specifically to them. With the kids we focused on hand washing, germ transmission, and we had a Bible lesson about Jesus and the Women at the well, and explained how faith in Jesus can give us "living water"

The Adults focused on education about healthily ways to prepare food, washing hands, salmonella, germs, and general hygiene practices that will better their lives. We found that many people had a general knowledge of these practices, but usually not to the fullest extent. Tiding up these loose end's in their knowledge will lead to better health and hygiene practices, as well as a better quality of life for them. Better health and hygiene also lends itself to making the water filter the most useful that it can be.

During lunch Pastor Ben and Alanzo, who works at the Ysleta Lutheran Mission, went over to the other church that we are going to be at later in the week and recovered the missing water filters, They brought the supplies back, and the team assembled the filter's assembly line style, which proved to be very efficient. Once five of the filters were done the team split off, with two groups going to distribute these filters into individual homes. The remainder of the team stayed back to assemble the remaining filters.

It was an awesome experience to be able to install these filter's in the people's homes. It was evident how grateful they were. These residents need to boil their water before they drink it, or they purchase all of their water from the store. Can you imagine that? Countless hours and Pesos will be saved with these water filters! It was amazing to take the water out of their outdoor spicket, run it through the filter for the first time, and watch them take a drink! The smiles on their faces, gratitude in their eyes, the joy of sharing the clean water with other members of the family is an experience that really can't be put into words. How can you quantify lives changed? How can you put fully into perspective the love of Christ being shared with these people?

Tomorrow we will be giving additional health and hygiene lessons as well as distributing the remainder of the filters. God worked in big ways today, I for one can't wait to see what he does tomorrow!

Outside view of the people going to and from classes at Santa Biblia Church, Juarez Mexico