My husband, Eddie, left for Burkino Faso last Sunday. He is there with a team from our church. They are working to get clean drinking water to a village. Eddie was very excited to be able to apply his skills as a civil engineer to design the holding tank. For the few weeks that he is there he is working with a small group of men from our church to supervise construction of the tank. They have started a blog about their journey, but haven’t been able to update it yet.
Internet access is limited, but he posted this status on Facebook earlier today.
Making great progress on the concrete water tower. Today we got almost the entire rebar cage built, forms set for the slab, outlet pipe installed and propped the cage up so its ready for concrete tomorrow. Another great day of weather, but it was HOT. I am impressed by the work ethic of the Burkinabe…such hard workers and most of them are volunteering for the sake of the village.Thanks everyone for your prayers and support!
I am SOOOOOOO grateful that we live in the internet age and we have been able to communicate fairly easily with Skype and Facebook messaging almost every day. Otherwise, I would be going out of my mind.
Here are a few of the pictures that were posted by one of the full-time missionaries who are hosting Eddie’s group. (The first one is my favorite. He’s like my very own Indiana Jones.)
Photos used with permission.
The terrain is too rough for motor vehicles, so they have to use donkey carts to haul the materials. Apparently some women from the village are also volunteering to cart containers of sand and gravel on their heads.
It makes you take a minute to reflect on the things we take for granted, like turning on the faucet so that our kids can brush their teeth with clean water.
We have felt so uplifted this week. It must be all of the prayers coming from you because I have no other explanation. I haven’t experienced any of the anxiety I expected (although I don’t love being alone at night) and Nicholas has not had any problems adjusting, which is a small miracle in and of itself. The girls have been fine as well. The only thing that was a big concern to me was that the team was supposed to stop in Istanbul to catch their flight to Africa, and there is a lot of civil unrest in that area right now. But at the last minute they were re-routed because of the weather and got to go through France instead.
Thank you for your continued prayers and support for the next few weeks!
[…] need to do about four or five loads per week, instead of the thirteen we were doing before. After Eddie’s mission trip to build a water tank in Africa, we became much more aware of water conservation and energy use, […]