A waterful Wednesday...

Dan and Jonelle Stevens from Livingwater are here leading a three-day workshop that equips participants with sanitary water consumption practices and the tools needed to spread this knowledge in their communities.   Jared, Janelle, and I learned alongside community leaders from Awas TIngi, a group of translators used by the El Verbo church ministry, and a local nurse. 

We arrived a day into the workshop; even so it has been a taxing two days: our attention spans are all still waning since the end of the school year and it’s been 85 - 90 °F with 90% humidity. What’s been most difficult, however, has been maintaining an open and curious attitude throughout the sessions…the material itself is tailored for less-developed countries, in particular isolated rural areas. In addition, the workshop normally lasts ten days, so ideas we covered were the most fundamental: how to minimize the intake of pathogens into the human body.  So we discussed the reasons to hand wash, when to hand wash, how to hand wash, along with ways to properly store and transport clean water. 

All this to say that it seemed pretty basic at times, which set me up for a fairly dismissive attitude.  But that wasn’t the point of the workshops; their point was to teach how to teach these ideas.  And I was also interested in how Dan and Jonelle were themselves teaching.   So I was forced to constantly check myself, step  back, and refocus. 

All of that is to say that I’ve been required to concentrate way harder than I ever expected. Oh, and did I mention that we worked in English, Spanish, Miskto, and Mayagna?  Four languages.

We’re going into Awas tomorrow, so it’s fairly imperative that I understand the material.  Our twelve person class will be teaching there over the course of the next few days before distributing fifty bucket filters.

In other news from Lake Wobegon, Tim and Erik installed another filtration system, this time within the orphanage.  They were slowed by a fairly long power-outage, which are frequent here.  Tim wants me to mention the help they received from one of the kids here, named Leodon.  “He’s a pretty cool kid.”

Linnet and Rachel spent the day preparing educational activities for the trip to Awas. 

We had our first bananas of the trip today. 

Pray for us as we prepare to travel, and especially for our work in the village.  We will need health (well, we really only need to be able to hold liquids), energy, concentration, direction, patience (Have you heard the expression, “hurry up and wait.”?  This is where it originated), and a decent breeze (it’s going to be hot).

 Linnet would like me to point out that because we'll be in the village for the next couple days, we will not have access to the internet (and not updating the blog)...

-Zac!