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.

September Prayer Letter

Hello again from Quito, it feels like much more than a month has passed since my last prayer letter. Thankyou for your prayers which have supported and carried me through the past few weeks.

In General
I finished my structured Spanish learning at the start of September, finishing level 6 of 12, which means I got through the imperfect, perfect and pluperfect but escaped before the subjunctive tense.
I´ve decided to attend my local church, Iñaquito. The building holds approx. 800 people and there are three (soon to be four) Sunday morning services. The church was started by HCJB in the 1950s for their missionaries but is now organised and run by Ecuadorians.

Work
I started two weeks ago in the Water Projects office and have been getting reacquainted with the water engineering I studied at university. At present, I´ve started a study into the feasibility of chlorinating the water supply at Carabuela, a large community to the north of Quito where construction of a supply network is currently ongoing. I have also tentatively begun outline design of a community latrine block which we may have the chance to plan and implement for a community to the west of Quito amongst the Tsáchila (Colorado) people. The Tsáchila are regarded as an unreached people group. This is an area in which Water Projects has not worked before. Please pray for opportunities to improve physical and spiritual health through our work there.

My time in the Water Projects office won´t just be spent in engineering. HCJB are currently developing a programme aimed at encouraging people from Latin America into world mission. This year, I will be subject to the mobilisation programme as it is developed to give feedback. The programme will cover five areas; spiritual formation, theological education, vocational experience, cross cultural skills and experience, language acquisition. Amongst other things, I will be spending some of my week continuing Spanish learning and studying the theology of community development. I will also be learning some Quichua, the native language of the communities in which Water Projects work. It will be good to be able to speak some words of their first language but, as it is completely unlike any language I know, progress will be slow! I have also started to study “Celebration of Discipline” by Richard Foster, a book I was given at Christmas last year but haven´t had the guts to start until now! Please pray for me as I learn through all these activities. I´d be interested to hear your thoughts on the “Celebration of Discipline” book too if you have ever read it. We will be joined next month by two work teams who will stay with at least one community and participate in the construction of their water system. The New Zealand work team will head off to Carabuela on 29th September to work on that project. The Harrogate work team will arrive on 21st October and will be staying for two weeks. Please pray for the safety and health of both teams, their witness in the communities, that they will gain a clear understanding of Water Projects´ work and that they will be encouraged in their own walk with God.
Next week (29th Sept – 2nd Oct), I will accompany one of the Water Projects engineers on his visits to a number of communities in the Carchi and Esmeraldas provinces in the north and northeast of the country. It will be a great opportunity to see a number of different projects and cultures and experience a warmer climate!!

Ecuador
Sunday, 28th September will be the vote on the referendum in Ecuador to vote on a new national constitution. This topic was the subject of many heated debates between the teachers at my language school. As voting is compulsory for all, this week leading up to the referendum, both sides for “Sí” or “No” are bombarding the airwaves with arguments for and against the Constitution. The document is incredibly wide-ranging in that it is a blueprint for the operation of a country. Please pray for the continued stability of the country after the vote and for safety in our travels on the day of the result!

Spanish...Schmanish

Today I started Quichua lessons! Quichua is the first language of most people living in the highlands (everything is high here, but they live higher!) and in the areas where we will be working on water projects. It would be great to be able to communicate with people there in their first language but I don´t expect to learn too much. Whereas Spanish is fairly similar to French or at least is a Latin based language, Quichua is unlike anything!

Had a couple of days of gorgeous sunshine recently and so I got to see Cotopaxi and a few of the other volcanos for the first time. The mountains are beautiful, Cotopaxi is an almost perfect cone. Here´s one I drew earlier...

bog? bolg? blog??

Hi
So, I've decided to do a blog really just to make my prayer letters a bit more widely available. But who knows what else might appear here...I certainly don't, but I will try and make it interesting.
x

First Prayer Letter from Ecuador

Greetings from Quito!

Yes, I and my luggage have arrived here safely, I can't quite believe that it was only two weeks ago, it feels like I've been here much longer.
Thankyou for all your prayers, encouragement and support in the past couple of months in getting me here and for the warmth of my send-off both from Carey and from Wellington St on my last Sunday in Northern Ireland.


Since I've arrived, I've been settling into my own little flat just down the street from HCJB and the Water Projects office (I'll be moving about a bit between flats during my time here). On my first Monday I attended a Water Projects team meeting which brought workers from all over Ecuador to Quito for the day. It was a great opportunity for me to meet those whom I'll be working with during this year. The meeting was held in Spanish so I'm not sure I'm completely au fait (French..tch...more of that later) with all that went on but it was very exciting to be in the office and see where I'll be based.


I started language school a week ago in a different part of town, I travel there on the 'Trole', a cross between a bus and a tram. It appears to be the Quitenan equivalent of the Tube i.e. no one talks. I've been making fair progress in class so far, thanks mainly to my rudimentary French but my teacher doesn't let me get away with speaking French in a Spanish accent. I'll be at language school for four weeks in total, seven hours a day for one-to-one lessons. My teacher is Isabel, she's slightly younger than me, a mechanical engineer and a Christian! I'm pleasantly bewildered by how much we have in common. Not only is she able and willing to teach me the Christian and church vocabulary but she can provide Spanish terms for Autocad too!


The Harrisons (Martin Harrison will be my boss at Water Projects) have been stellar at helping me settle in, from picking my up at the airport to using their internet to the provision of home-made curry, I really feel looked after.


I've been to a couple of churches here but I feel like I can't really judge which one I will attend until I can understand the services a bit better. There is an English language church but I'd prefer to stick at a Quitenan one.

I would greatly value your prayers in the next month for the following issues:
- success in Spanish so that I will be able to relate to folks in the communities I will visit with work
- energy to continue learning this month
- thanks for the Harrisons and the support they have already been
- thanks for Isabel, please pray we will be an encouragement to each other
- prayer against attack of homesickness and further physical sickness (I've had one visit of las amoebas amigas already)
- that I will settle quickly in a church and determine areas of service.


10th August was Independence Day for Ecuador. On the Saturday night, there was a concert held in the main square and all the buildings were lit up in celebration. The streets in the historic town centre were shut off to cars and were thronged with people all night.

All credit for the photos goes to Isabel, I'm a hopeless photographer.