Of the Long Road Home

My last memories of drilling in Togo take place in a rainstorm, in a palm-speckled valley cultivated for corn. The steady sounds of a pulley squeaking above us and the water splashing in the settling pit both blend with those of thunder and heavy rain.

Elijah, David Reeve's 7-year-old son, is with us since school is out for the summer. He grins and clasps his body in the cold rain. The water in our two barrels for drilling is warmer than the rain falling on us, but at least there are no strong winds in this storm.

Gusts came only at the beginning of the storm, stirring hundreds of fruit bats from the wooded side of the valley, where residents of a Lassa Tchou neighborhood live in their thatch-roof, round-walled homes.

We finish at 25 feet, three feet deeper than the day before, which is encouraging because we lost the hole the day before. The threads at the end of our metal pipe had worn out after a month and a half of drilling, and the bit broke off in the hole at the threads. We could not go further. But we made up that distance and then some during my last day drilling.

Monday or Tuesday, Mr. Reeves and the Lassa Tchou drillers may finish. But I will have to receive word of the results from a distance.

Tomorrow morning I leave for Lome by bus to get visas for Ghana. I will meet my friend Late (pronounced like the drink) in Lome. He stayed with us in Kara for more than two weeks to learn to drill, and he hopes to implement the drilling technique in southern Togo, in the lowland sands and clays. He will return to Kara later in May to do a soy bean project among the Kabiye with the Church of Christ team.

On Wednesday I will leave for Accra, Ghana by bus. Then I will leave Ghana Thursday night and arrive the next day in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. After a weekend in Ethiopia, Jeremy and I will leave for the United States on Monday.

My travels are coming to an end. Lord willing, the work in Togo has just begun. I'm humbled to have been a part of it.

Of Making Holes in Stone

Mazalo (her name means "Saturday," after her birthday) says that her community's water source may not be much, "but at least it's not very far." We walked with her for about 20 minutes down an incline to the river, which in the dry season lies stagnet over its bedrock base. Mosquito larva wrigled in the semi-murky water that she scooped into her broad aluminum basin. Then we walked back, she with 15 to 20 gallons on her head, for another 20 minutes uphill. At least it's not very far.

Her community, Kaacade (pronouced KA-cha-de), needs water. According to my host David Reeves, its members came because the Togolese government took their for environmental conservation and gave them titles to the land they occupy now.

Thus the village has very little infrustracture, especially where water is concerned. The village has one central well which, in the dry season, holds less than one foot of water and a large frog. Tadpoles frequently accompany the innertube rubber bags used to pull up water. This well is also about 20 minutes from Mazalo's home.

Our first attempts were on Mazalo's land. Afer a week of crooked holes, hitting rock at five feet every time, experimenting with new bit designs, collapsing sand and gravel and the hassels of teaching a new crew how to drill, we had four holes no more than 10 feet deep.

The bit head broke off in two of the holes, one became unusable after too much sand and gravel collapsed, and another had rock beginning at arm's length, so we abandoned it at once. We put a pump in the last well, which was closest to the house and about 10 feet deep.

Mazalo's husband, Iyabane, assured us there would be water at that depth during the rainy season, but I cannot in good conscience call it a well, rainy season or otherwise.

Determined to make a well in the area, we tried again near the central community well in order to provide a more plentiful, cleaner water source. Rock appeared within the first few feet of every pilot hole we started, so it wasn't until our fifth try or so that we found a spot void of shallow rock at which to set up our rig.

After some difficulty keeping our hole straight, we finally arrived at a depth of 14 feet, the hand-dug well's water level. At the end of that day, we took out the pipe, and just to show a newcomer the depth of our well, we stuck a plastic pipe down the hole and it did not go as deep as we had hoped. In fact, it only went down about five feet. Rock had sealed off our hole.

It took some time to convince the drillers that this was not the product of witchcraft or the devil, or that if it was, then said powers of darkness used a perfectly natural method for their supernatural malevolence, i.e., a rock had slid over or else we drilled through a layer of collapseable rock, as we theorized to have encountered in some areas of Ethiopia.

We tried to break through the rock the next day and our bit broke off because the hole was wide at the top so our hits were crooked on the rock. Since the bit was near the top, we chose to dig down five feet to get the bit and remove the obstrusive stone. As we suspected, a single stone from a layer full of grapefruit-sized single stones had slid into our hole.

Thus we continued, until our bit broke off at the bottom of the hole. And then we reemed. And the reemer bit broke off at the bottom of the hole because we put it down with a cracked pipe attachment piece (a flimsy, cast iron reducer, more specifically).

Yet our problem hasn't been drilling through rock, or at least not that alone. The problem has been drilling crookedly through the rock. If the hole is not straight, the bits strike the rock at an angle, inducing the sideways stress that bends and smashes off the bit. In clay the side of the hole can be worn down and straightened, but stone is less forgiving.

So we finished our hole at 17 feet, and we're still developing it. We think it's producing about half a liter every 10 minutes. We're hoping for five liters every minute, at least. If one pumps this water out regularly, new water channels may open up and the well could produce more water than one can pump out. Having left the residents of Kaacade developing the well, we went back Friday and the recharge hadn't improved, so the well may not be workable.

After some rest on a weekend safari, as described in the previous post, we began and finished another well at Lassa Tchou, where we made our first well. We had planned to return, regardless of what would happen in Kaacade, with hopes of having the crew there make several wells in their village so that they will be sufficiently trained on basics and fundamentals to try out the technique in other areas on their own.

New logistical difficulties soon arose. Early rains have come, understandably prompting many who would help us drill to work their fields instead, so help is harder to find, although we've found enough to keep working. The village residents are also busy repairing their homes after the occasional hail and wind storms.

For three days in a row, after six hours of scorching sun, the evening unleashed towering thunderheads, sweeping them over the mountains and letting loose their avalanches of rain, hail, lightning and wind that tore tin roofs from houses, fell trees and rendered everything beyond 100 feet invisible amid the torrents. Fortunately such storms have let up for the time being, along with the eight-hour power blackouts that accompany them.

And they did not stop us from completing our well at 30 feet! Who knows? With more than a full week left, we may get another well in yet.

Of Safari

After two weeks of drilling in Kaacade, before we returned again to our first location, Matt Miller, his daughter Abby, the Kennell family (all with the Church of Christ Kabiye team) and I went on a weekend safari. We went to the Pendjari gamepark, three and a half hours away, in the neighboring country of Benin.

I've had the pleasure of African safari before, but never under the guidence of Mr. Miller. He has mastered the art of approaching a herd of elephants as they cross the road, and backing up towards them until they charge the vehicle. "The trick is to have plenty of open road in front of you," he says about enticing elephant rampages.

I captured an instance on video. In the background, one of the Kennell's gradeschool-age daughters gives instructions about her will as the elephants approach, growling and trumpeting. No, I did not know that elephants could growl either.

Such moments were reminiscent of the Jurassic Park scene wherein the Tyrannosaur chased a jeep. While the jeep sped away to safety in the film, I have no doubt that Mr. Miller would've at least driven slowly to lengthen the pursuit, if he did not back up to restart the chase entirely.

The heat was brutal during the afternoons, 104 in the shade, but fortunately, we were staying in lodges. Unfortunately for some of our friends still arriving, their car broke down seven miles from the lodge within the gamepark. No animals harrassed them, but they stayed stranded in the blistering night heat until the next morning when a tourist vehicle found them and took them and their luggage the rest of the way.

On our return trip we visited among the most spectacular waterfalls I've ever seen, also in Benin. Children who lived in the area glided easily across rocks slick with moss and helped the members of our party hike to and from the falls. A vast pool spread out at the base of the waterfall, and the Benin children jumped into it from their 20-foot climb up the cascade's rock wall.

I'm in gratefully indebted to the Kabiye team for the awe-inspiring experience, as well as the much needed rest. I'm happy that we were able to put it to good use with the completed well in the week that followed.

Of a Man Who Was Disembowled by a Warthog

I met a man at our new drill site whom a warthog disembowled. The beast attacked him in his fields, tearing into his belly with tusks and teeth. He should not be alive today according to my missionary host David Reeves, the hospital doctor who attended the victim, and the victim himself, who in telling the story regularly says, "I should not be alive today."

He became a Christian some time after the accident. Unfortunately, he cannot regularly attend his local church because he has a wife in another village, and he takes care of both spouses. Somewhat naturally therefore, he speaks against polygamy. He tells the youth not to make his mistake. Polygamy is too hard, he says, and God does not approve of it. He relishes this opportunity to testify against multi-spouse lifestyles as an insider, while at the same time carrying out the responsibilities of a twice-committed husband.

"It is clear to me now," he tells people. "God kept me alive to do this work in his kingdom."

Often God's purposes are clear only in hindsight, and no doubt even all that we realize in this life will not be clear until the next, when we do not look through the glass darkly, if it will be fathomable at all. Who can declare God's purposes? And who would have been so presumptuous to venture to the victim in surgery that the God he did not yet know had spared him to warn against polygamy? It's our double joy that death did not take him then and that he has such a strong testimony now.

Seeing Providence unfold like that is a blessing to which I can presently attest. Almost daily I praise God that we did not start our first well where we are drilling now. It was a toss up as to where we would begin, and nothing would have been so discouraging as to have begun in this village where the rock begins four feet below the surface, even after digging three pilot holes in the same area before settling on the one we have now.

We're taking a couple days to repair a bit that was broken at the new site, to make one or two bits specifically for the rock, to straighten our nine-foot steel pipe, and then double or even triple-weight said pipe to make a glorified rock bar. After two days, after 20 hours of smashing pipe into the ground, we have advanced five feet. It looks like a hard week ahead of us. Praise God for the providential first success behind us.

Of Our First Well in Togo

After four days, we finished drilling, not knowing if we had water.

We made a make-shift pump to empty the water from the hole, to see if it would recharge. The water came out cloudy, then clear, then cloudy, then clear - signals that new water channels were opening below. After half an hour, we still had not been able to pump our 28.5-foot well dry. And the water became colder, as one would expect water hidden from the sun to be.

Slowly smiles spread across the faces of the village drillers. Children began laughing and playing with the water. A few women started to clap in rhythm and sing bits of a song. But I wouldn't say it was a well, cautious as I am, pessimistic as I was.

Generally one pumps the well dry, and lets it recharge, then pumps it dry, then lets it recharge until enough new channels of water open up so that one cannot pump it dry again. The process can take weeks.

After 1.5 hours, we were never able to pump our hole dry. We had a well.

I came to Togo dubious about whether or not we could succeed, considering our three dry holes in Ethiopia. And when I saw gargantuan chunks of granite protruding from the ground at every turn, my morale dropped deeper I've ever drilled. Rock had been our demise at the new work area in Awashbuni, and I was nearly certain it would undo us here.

My fears were not eased by shopping for materials. One shop owner (whom we had not told about our well-making intent) told us that the pulleys we sought were in short supply because their most frequent buyers used them for hand-digging wells, and no one was digging wells anymore because they continually reached rock and could go no further.

"Please, come to my village," one chief said to me, according to my translators at a church retreat. "We have no water because there is too much rock."

However, the situation at least seemed hopeful when we surveyed our first drill site on Tuesday. The village had a large, hand-dug well which would provide us the water necessary to drill. Its water started at 18 feet, and those who drilled the well said it was "dirt" all the way down to the water.

We soon discovered said dirt to be gravel held together by sandy soil. This is problematic because gravel cannot squeeze through our drill-tip valve. Neither can the gravel be ground into smaller sediment because the arrow-head point cannot get a solid hit on individual pieces.

By Wednesday's end, we hadn't reached 10 feet because gravel continually fell into the hole, and our hole had beveled out to where we had no way of ensuring a straight hole. We moved our tools and derrick and prepared to start again the next day.

Thursday we sharpened a steel coupling, attached it to some of our plastic drill stem pipe and jabbed it into the ground, slightly moistening the ground with water. Thus we stuffed dirt into our pipe, took it out and cleaned it until we were 10 feet down. Then we attached our steel pipe and drill bit and began again.

After some trouble with the pulley, and after some experimentation with a piece of large plastic pipe to keep gravel from falling into our hole, we were on our way. We were on our way - until we hit another layer of gravel.

For this new layer, we removed the bit, put on the sharp steel coupling and used our hand to make a one-way valve at the top of the drill pipe. We covered the top of our pipe on the way up and uncovered it on the way down, thereby lifting the column of water on the way up, and flinging the rig down fast enough so that the water spewed out. The method is also known as Chinese sludging, a 3,000-year-old technique.

Once we were through that layer of gravel, we hit rock. For the remainder of the day, we pounded the layer and made a bit progress. Then we put on new pipe - plastic pipe instead of more steal pipe, which we had been using to force our way through the rock – and the plastic pipe came apart where we had glued on couplings. We tried a piece of pipe on which we used different glue, and we got the same result. So we pulled out the rig for the day and we saw that the sharp teeth of our coupling had been pounded back inside the coupling.

We spent the first half of Friday buying and threading cheap galvanized pipe to replace our plastic pipe, hoping that our drilling rig wouldn't be too hard to pull. And we also brought a drill bit made specifically for rock. We drilled the rest of the day, progressed through the rock, two feet of it (I'm assuming it was a fractured rock; I don't believe we could've drilled so quickly through granite), and then through a foot of sand.

We drilled hard again half of the next day, Saturday, without incident until we were at a total of 28.5 feet. The workers, to my encouragement, wanted to continue to 36 feet, but I insisted that we stop where we were. We started at a lower level than the hand-dug well, and that the water table started around 18 feet, and we were in sand that should, theoretically, make a good aquifer. We didn't need to be pushing our luck.

So we reamed the hole wide enough for our casing (the wall of the well, in essence), put in our casing, poured buckets of water down the casing that stuck up a meter above ground level so as to flush out dirty water, and then tried to pump the well dry using a quickly thrown together inertia pump. As aforementioned, we could not pump it dry, and we had our well.

Once we were sure it was a well, we put gravel, then sand, then clay around the casing to create essentially a giant bio-sand filter to keep surface water from contaminating the aquifer.

We'll spend this next week installing a nice, steal pump since the entire village will use it and it will hold up better than the standard plastic pump we put together for individual families. I hope to have a ridiculous amount of pictures posted by that time.

All in all, we praise God for Togolese villager's hard work and for David Reeves' long hours put to finding all of our materials, and for all of his communications work, and always for your prayers. We fought hard and won a victory. May it be the first of many.

Of What the Children Know

Last night it rained on the missionary children's Easter egg hunt, and I've never seen children more happy about a drenched holiday activity.

All day it had been hot, the intense heat that squeezes the moisture out of every last corner and lifts it into the clouds.

We felt it build slowly, especially throughout the all-church retreat, where evangelical congregations had been gathered all weekend for singing and teaching from missionaries and their own members, culminating in the Easter service. Between preachers, mildly chaotic offerings, and a Lord's Supper that used homemade bread and millet beer from a single cup, a couple lead songs from their seats. The call-and-response hymns followed the beat of clapping, drums, cowbells (of which we need more) and an assortment of homemade percussion instruments. Near the end several ladies left to prepare the meal - fish, rice and spicy peanut sauce - that we enjoyed at the end of the service. We ate underneath a mango tree, hiding from said building heat.

Late afternoon, the missionaries gathered at one of their homes for a capella singing, Scripture reading, supper and the Easter Egg hunt. We finished the service, and one of the kids reported large, dark clouds building overhead. Yesterday we had the same phenomena, but they had blow away without leaving anything behind. Not this time. After a thick, sweet smelling gust, a drizzle fell and grew into fat drops over the course of the next hour. The children were ecstatic. They twirled in the remaining rain after the egg hunt.

Growing up in Togo, they know the value of dry-season rain.

At the moment most of the wells are dry. Only a few springs and water laden areas remain. We saw one hand-dug well with water about 36 feet from the surface. It might be a good place to start drilling, now that we have most of our rig!

We need a few more purchases and extra materials to be well prepared (it's impossible to avoid potential puns; my apologies) - we need a bit specifically designed for the layer of rock we're sure to go through, and a tool to extract the pipe if our fittings become unglued from the drill stem, for example - but otherwise we're ready to begin. Last post I said that if we were ready to go by now it would be a miracle. How appropriate then that we're ready on the anniversary of our redemption and the greatest miracle of all!

Of Every-Day Miracles and Togo

Too often I ignore daily miracles: rising suns, falling stars, waning moons, and all of those things which happen very often yet don’t have to happen at all. To paraphrase a man (G.K. Chesterton) whom I paraphrase too much: all the things that make celestial patterns happen, all of our “Laws of Physics” and anything else that science notes, are merely records of what usually happens.

There is nothing that says gravity on earth must continue to operate at 9.8 meters per second squared. Nothing prevents it from vanishing altogether. “Laws,” after all, are only as good as the One who enforces them, and it's His purpose they serve.

That same subtle miraculousness is true of travel, another one of Chesterton’s example. At times mass transit works so well that one is surprised when something does not arrive or leave on time. Such routine gives the impression of dead, monotonous systems, cogs whirring impersonally. Thus one forgets the tremendous amount of life behind such valuable systems that sustain the routine, resulting in ingratitude.

Here the frequent traveler to the developing world should have an advantage in resisting ingratitude, because anything that goes right in the third world is unquestionably the result of a miracle. Thus I praise God from the abundant Providence that has taken me from Ethiopia, to Ghana, and finally to Togo. Here we hope to drill a test well, and if it is successful, to thoroughly teach a group of Church of Christ missionary families how to drill and establish a long-term water program for the Kabiye (Literally, "Rock Pilers") people of northern Togo.

David Reeves and Mark Kennell of the Kabiye team met me in Accra, Ghana’s capital because the flight was cheaper than anything directly to Lome, Togo’s capital. And we had heard that some very essential drilling mud could be found in Accra, whereas it was not in Lome, or anywhere else in Togo.

For two days we meticulously called every business in the Accra directory and searched every hub of commerce on the social rung: from the high-scale, Western-style malls and supermarkets that might stave off even Wal-Mart, to the classic markets littered with a few blocks of hardware stores next to a few blocks of cloth vendors next to a few blocks of produce stands. The city rivals Nairobi in its development, serving as a commercial hub for much of West Africa.

Near the end of our Accra trip, we had found a few key items but not the most needed item, the drilling mud. We were became semi-desperate, hoping that maybe one of dozens of people perpetually wandering the streets with either water, milk or fruit on their head, or electric hair clippers and pens from Nigeria in their hands would bring several bags of bentonite (which we usually use for drilling mud) right to the window of our vehicle, ready to bargain the price for half an hour so that we could buy the blasted stuff for a few dollars cheaper.

Then the day before we had to leave, someone who was staying at our guest house gave us an address to a pump supplies store, and the ladies at the pump supplies store gave us a bore-hole well-driller’s number, and the bore-hole well-driller gave us a ladies’ number, and the lady met us the next morning at 6 a.m. in front of a grocery store and handed us two containers of expensive white powder (dehydrated drilling mud) in a black plastic bag. And then we were ready to leave.

We crossed the boarder into Togo with little issue and spent the remainder of our nine-hour drive traversing forestal mountains and roaring past quiet villages. Every so often, the ruins of an ornate Catholic church would tower over a Togolese village, and the occasional roadside graveyard would pop out of the forest as we drove, both remnant features of Togo’s past as a French colony besides the country’s official French language.

We arrived that evening and settled into my apartment at the Reeves' household. For the rest of the week, David and I scoured Kara in search of the necessary materials. And I've already spent a couple of evenings beneath a shower of sparks, using a hand grinder to cut out bit pieces for our local welder.

Not all has been toil, however. Slowly I become acquainted with the other Kabiye team members through Thursday morning basketball games and men's prayer time; through mountain hikes with team members and their visiting, U.S. church supporters; and through Sunday evening worship, after Sunday morning worship with local village churches. And we've celebrated the birthday of now-nine-year-old Hannah Reeves, sibling to three younger brothers: Elijah, Gabriel and Caleb, the last an infant.

Tomorrow we continue our search for the final drilling rig materials, venturing to the capital city five hours away. If all goes well we should be able to drill by the middle of next week. Yet I recall that our schedule is in God's hands, that "all goes well" is a miracle to inspire utmost awe.