November Prayer Letter

Hello!

What a busy month-and-a-bit it´s been!

Trip to Esmeraldas
At the end of September I accompanied one of Water Projects´ engineers, Cesar Cortez, to Esmeraldas province to visit some of his projects. Esmeraldas is a coastal province where Cesar has worked for 10 years, mainly providing water through drilling wells in many of the communities.
Esmeraldas was very different from Quito, the temperature rose into the thirties and the vegetation changed to sugar cane and banana plantations as we made the 9,000 ft descent to the coast from the Andes.
This was my first trip out of Quito and I was struck by the poverty in these communities where the houses are mainly one or two room, timber structures. The communities we visited were centred around the football pitch, Esmeraldas province provides most of the players for the national football team. Alongside the community development work, Cesar also carries out pastor training and mentoring in this province.

Unfortunately I fell ill before we could travel up the Cayapas River to visit communities in which water projects are ongoing or in the planning stage. I will be involved in the design of the water supply network for San Miguel, one of those communities.

Community Development course
HCJB invited Dr Dick Crespo from Wheaton College in Illinois to facilitate the above course. Dr Crespo´s aim was to get us thinking about how truly gospel-integrated community development can be achieved. How can community development be thoroughly integrated rather than just doing community development with a gospel message ´tacked´ on the side? It was challenging and gave us a lot to think about. Please pray for Martin and Ruth Harrison who have just assumed the role as Director for Community Development for HCJB and will be endeavouring to implement what was learnt and discussed.

Harrogate Work Team

Mayfield Community Church in Harrogate, the Harrisons´ home church, sent a team of 10 to work on projects for two weeks and I went along to help. Our first stop was Carabuela where, for two days, we helped with concreting the top slab to the reservoir and backfilling some trenches where pipes had already been laid. The Carabuela project is a large one, work has been going on since March and is set to continue until well into next year.Placing concrete to the reservoir top slab in Carabuela

The second community visited was Lupaxi Chico in Chimborazo province, about 5 hours south of Quito. Here we stayed in an old church building and, in the mornings, helped with construction of concrete floor slabs for latrines at a number of houses. In the afternoons, the team ran a Bible club for the children (Children only attend school until 1pm in Ecuador). We played games, the team acted out a Bible story which was narrated in Spanish and then they did some colouring in. The children loved it and the adults were also eager to do some colouring in too! Each evening the church held special services, making the most of the team´s presence and also that of Efraim´s preaching, a technician with HCJB who is also a pastor. The members of the local Catholic church were invited to attend these services too. At the final evening´s service, the secretary of the community´s water committee was presented, with his family, to the church. He had been living apart from his family but, as a result of the week of services and preaching, he had been moved to come back to the Lord and be reconciled with his family. Other members of his family had also become Christians that week too and, on our last night, the church was able to pray for them and praise God for how he has worked.Chimborazo volcano

Despite the language barrier, the team felt that they were able to build relationships with the community and the community enjoyed having us visit them too. It is hard to describe everything that happened and that we experienced during our 5 days in Lupaxi Chico so here´s a very brief resumé: judging a singing competition, excitement of children in receiving half an apple after washing their hands, watching our dinner be slaughtered, watching the whole operation of the community cooking for 120 people for our last evening, finding a chicken claw in my soup, lowering the minibus down a mud track by ropes, baffling the locals by photographing everything (trains, worms, pig being killed), playing Duck, Duck, Goose with the kids, hail so hard that we had to shout to be heard in our tin-roofed house, Chimborazo volcano in the morning.

Huge portions at the community dinner

Before heading back to Quito, the team stopped for one night in Shell, on the edge of the Amazon jungle. HCJB have another base here with a hospital and Water Projects office. It was interesting to visit the town as there is a possibility that I might live and work there for a few months next year. We took a tour of the hospital, MAF hangar and Nate Saint´s house.

In the next month…
Later this week I will be attending another HCJB course, on mentoring for 2½ days. Then I should be based in Quito for the next few weeks. I will be mainly doing some structural design work of a water tower, school and church buildings. As the New Year approaches, next year´s water projects will move into the planning and feasibility stage and therefore I´ll be involved in that too.

Prayer points
- Praise for health and safety of the work team whilst we were the communities. One member, Ian, fell sick the day after arriving in Quito and had to be hospitalised. He, therefore, had a very different experience to the rest of the team but in spite of his illness he counted his time here as a great blessing.
- Pray for the ongoing impact of the witness the team had in Lupaxi Chico through their kids´ work and practical demonstration of love to the community, for the secretary´s family as they continue to be reconciled with each other and with God.
- Pray for my work in the office, for God´s help in clarity of mind and determination to complete this design work.
- Pray that the routine I settle into in the next few weeks back in Quito will be a spiritually healthy one.
- Pray against homesickness, I felt homesick for the first time as the team left to go back to England.