Building the Future...

Our last day of work!  Definitely exciting but also somewhat sad…  We’ve been pouring all of our work effort into making a water tower that will feed the Oasis House property…  To use some of our vocabulary we’ve been discussing this week – All week we’ve been chopping vegetables in the prep kitchen, today we started to see the Feast…  If you remember earlier in the trip there was always a conspicuous “H” in the wide angle views of the property…  And now, behold – the walls of the water tower…

Me and the Three Johns worked all morning and early afternoon on building forms for the concrete support columns…  It started out great, but then we had to battle the Laws of Physics (which are apparently firm and unyielding)…  But we got by with a little help from our friends – namely, John Fette, John Horning, and Mark Parker…  John F. was the brute strength (thank you, LifeTime Fitness), John H. was the finesse and good cheer and Mark was the surge that pushed us through the finish line…  Mark worked most of the morning on building the most sturdy sawhorses in Africa…

There was a lot of digging going on down the hill…  Jason and Brian were digging support holes for an enclosure for the block making machine…  The ground was pretty rough so Brian came up with, what he is calling “The Bertke One Thousand”…  That guy has a future in Third World construction tools…

Here’s a picture of the Bertke One Thousand in action…

When everything was ready up at the water tower, the guys could finally pour the concrete mix into the forms for the columns…  The guys worked as hard as they could, and they used every grain of cement that we had…  I have a feeling that this is going to be a sturdy tower!

Brian and I went with one of our Nigerian friends, Adi (Eddie) into the Kisayhip village…  We greeted the chairman (who is kind of like the mayor, I suppose) and he took us all around the village…  The next several pictures are people we met and things we saw in the village…  There is a picture of a woman at a well (the most primitive of wells), and there are pictures of children pumping out water at a well that was dug out by bore-hole equipment…

I’ll leave you with a quote from Scripture that we’ve been pondering today…  It’s from the book of Isaiah…

"Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:  to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?

Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter - when you see the naked, to clothe him, 
       and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.

Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I. "If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.

The LORD will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame.  You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.

Isaiah 58: 6-11