Rain, rain… Come again another day

The rains are returning to Ga’dang land, for which we are very thankful, as it means our tribal friends have been able to get busy planting.  It was so good to see the green sprouts of corn and rice  in

 

all the fields as we drove along and then hiked into the village.  The river is coming back to life and all the wells are beginning to give water again too.

 

 

This trip into the tribe was a productive one for me as we were able to get a lot accomplished.  There were things to be done in preparation for our next trip as a family as well as getting ready for the U.K. Summit team coming to help us work on the house in July. 

To get ready for our next trip as a family, all of our belongings, which were being stored in one of the rooms at Christina’s house needed to be  moved down into our house.  This meant closing in and securing one of the rooms to do so.  Thankfully I brought a Filipino friend along this time to help me,Lito, as he did most of this for me while I continued on with other jobs.  Lito was a great help to me, both as a ‘kasama’ (companion) and in all the work he did for me, no matter what it was, from moving boxes to cleaning out the water barrel before we hooked it up for water collection.

As some of you have heard, we have been blessed once again with a group of people who are willing to come over and help us get some work done on our house.  This team, mostly from the U.K. will help me in getting the house completely closed in so we can move into it in August, after our annual regional conference.  I have been blessed with a Ga’dang friend, Zaldo, whom I been able to hire and train to use the various tools and machines.  Zaldo has been great as he helps me prepare all the lumber for the next phase of building on the house. 

This time we were also able to replace one of the water pumps as well.   One of our supporting churches agreed to purchase some new pumps to replace the ones that are broken (more on that in the next blog entry).  Nothing like the missionary getting grubby dirty to draw a crowd!  Before installing the new pump we needed to remove the old one, which turned out to be a slimy, mucky job in itself.  But we got it done, and in the end the new pump was on. 

By Chuck