Drilling Wells, Etc.

Of the Long Road Home

2008-05-04T18:22:00.000-05:00

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

2008-04-27T10:16:00.001-05:00

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

2008-04-27T10:12:00.000-05:00

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

2008-04-07T07:08:00.001-05:00

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

2008-03-31T14:25:00.001-05:00

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

2008-03-24T02:49:00.000-05:00

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

2008-03-17T16:22:00.000-05:00

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.

Of Tantalus and Togo

2008-03-08T17:13:00.002-06:00

After some difficulty from drilling at our place in Awashbuni, we
decided to attempt a few easy wells instead of immediately embarking
on our third attempt. Joe had already drilled three wells in our area,
completing one per day. Those were down in the valley, a few miles
from our house. The further one moves from the road, from our home,
and further into the valley, the shallower the wells become. So we
drilled at the house of our good friend Haile "the School Teacher"
Faresa, hoping to avoid the large layer of rock directly beneath our
homestead. I don't know if we succeeded in avoiding said layer of
rock, but if so, we found an entirely new one which has caused us just
as much grief.

We lost the first rig to a foolish mistake which cost us the rig and
the hole, and then the bit broke off at the bottom of our second hole,
as it did at the bottom of the third hole, both of them the product of
poor welding. In an effort to make the best of our situation, we cased
and developed our third hole since it was fairly close to our intended
depth. No water thus far. We may be too shallow.

Camping at Haile's house, we could look out over wide fields of cut
straw and tall lines of swaying eucalyptus trees haphazardly dividing
properties, clustering occasionally around circular, thatch-roof
homes. Out there - out of earshot of our sloshing mud and our
whirring, clunking vehicle - water waited 30 feet below the land, not
60 feet and hiding beneath three feet of stone. 'Twas tantalizing, in
the purest sense of the word. In kinship with Tantalus: the water is
always just out of reach.

Nevertheless, we had a wonderful time at Haile's house. Everyday his
mother and sisters prepare the coffee ceremony for us and any other
neighbors who have dropped by. A few of his younger brothers (he has
17 siblings by two different mothers) help us with the labor. A couple
of the youngest set up tents in imitation of our campground, tents and
a cooking area set up behind a row of eucalyptus. We were sure to
provide the brothers with a thorough campout experience, including
smores one night. (May I recommend roasting marshmallows covered in
peanut butter; a gourmet roast). It was the least we could do after
the boys performed the coffee ceremony themselves at our campsite one
night, a particularly uplifting occasion since Jeremy and I had been
struggling alone with the drilling while Joe was in Uganda for a week
with a team from his home church, Christian Fellowship Church in
Evansville, Indiana.

They went to Uganda to survey an area where the church is supporting
several projects. The church team spent the previous week in Ethiopia
inspecting projects before leaving with Joe. Joe returned accompanied
by a friend, Cheryl, who was in Uganda while renewing her visa
to continue medical and agricultural work in Central Asia. She has
spent a few days of this past week with us at Haile's place, aiding us
in our drilling and such fiascoes as marshmallow roasting. Her
cheerful spirit and warm humor has been a blessing to us. She plans to
return to Afghanistan on Tuesday. Please keep her in your prayers.

Afterward, Joe and Jeremy will return to Haile's place and try to
develop the well in hopes that it will produce water. In the meantime,
I'm off to Togo in a matter of hours. Several Church of Christ
missionary families have raised funds and want to try out the
well-drilling technique in their area of northern Togo, so I'll be
with them for the next two months, returning to Ethiopia May 9 so that
I can return to the United States on May 12. Please pray that we'll be
able to drill wells there, that the water may be well within our
grasp.

Of Traffic Signs and Not Honking Your Horn

2008-02-04T01:36:00.001-06:00

Joe arrived last night, safe and sound. And we were fortunate enough
have driven him home at 3:50 am, legally, using our official Ethiopian
driver's license.

After going to the Department of Motor Vehicles, the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, and a training facility on the other side of town,
after venturing back and forth to offices and lines at the training
facility, after having papers stamped and signed in the tradition of
third-world bureaucracies that would've made Kafka proud, and after
attending a brief "orientation," as it was called, we received the
documents last Tuesday allowing us to join Ethiopia's fray traffic.

During the orientation, a man sat us down in a room with two posters
displaying all Ethiopian traffic signs. Some displayed pictures of
animals and people, some simply had lines streaking across at various
angles and through various background colors, and some were written in
Amharic and in Amharic script.

The gentleman who gave us the orientation (and no one had told us what
it was, exactly), gave us each a blank sheet of paper and said to
write our names at the top then write what we thought symbols 1
through 36 meant. Barely having an idea of what a third of them meant,
we completed the test with little hope of passing.

Fortunately, the gentleman in charge of the test came in afterward and
explained us all of the signs, and he made observations about how
silly it would be for one to go when a sign said "stop" or to drive
down roads that were not there. Then he signed our papers and sent us
off to another office.

No, we don't know what the test was for, but at least now we have full
knowledge of all the rules that no one regards. Did you know, for
instance, that it is not legal to honk at night? Or as our test giver
said, "There is no using of the horn at night."

While we did have our driver's licenses, we weren't able to have a
well waiting for Joe in Awashbuni. The one thing we established during
our ten-hour work days this past week is that our well is not a well.
Or at least it is one that produces no more than one cup of water
about every five hours, not nearly enough for a homestead.

Our well's water production makes sense. Since the hand-dug wells
around us are at the same depth and produce several liters every few
minutes, one could hardly expect our 2-inch diameter, bore-hole well
to produce near as much, especially if the aquifer we're in is only a
meter or so deep.

Jeremy and I did all we could to develop the well so that it would
produce more water. In addition to the well development we did when
Joe left, we blasted 16 barrels of water through with our motor pump,
pumped eight barrels through by hand and swabbed and plunged the well.
That cup of water was all we got.

In summary, the first well collapsed, and our second well is too
shallow. Will our third attempt be just right?

The bore-hole wells that give water to the school and a couple other
water-faucet locations near the highway are 40-some meters deep,
although others say there is good water past 30 meters. So we're going
deeper.

Everything is ready for the third attempt - the rig moved, the pit and
pilot hole dug, etc. We should have an intense week ahead of us.

Of the Novel City and Drunken Master

2008-01-19T01:59:00.001-06:00

We had a short week in Awashbuni, having spent most of our time scouring Addis for a water pump and tubing. Recently I learned that "Addis," of the capital city Addis Ababa, means "new." Considering all the construction, all the incomplete buildings caged in hand-hewn scaffolding, Addis certainly is (and maybe always will be, if construction remains incomplete) new.

And "Ababa" means "flower." Legend says the founders of the city found a previously unknown flower in this mountainous region. So much for the origins of our floral metropolis.

With equipment bought, we returned to the countryside and flushed about seven barrels of water through the well. According to Joe, usually one can pour water and flush it out with gravity alone - but this is not a usual well. So we cheated, forcing the water down with the motorized pump. Even after that development, the well doesn't seem to produce water. This well fought our drilling for a full week. It may fight our development for just as long.

Fortunately, this is nothing new. The crippled farmer's well in Bolivia needed about a week of development too and now it works fine. This might only be a matter of endurance.

We returned to Addis to welcome a group who was flying in from the United States and to meet some other missionaries interested in well-drilling in another part of Ethiopia.

I look forward to returning to Awashbuni, however. We didn't even take the time to eat our usual meal at the Millennium Cafe in the nearby town, or get accosted outside the café by Drunken Master.

We met Drunken Master during our first week, while shopping the nearby town. Jeremy and I sat in the car and a man of about 50, with a goatee on his face and beer on his breath, came asking for money. He explained that Hillary would win 2008 American election, and after we refused as graciously as possible, he took an old parking ticket from the windshield and handed it to us.

"You are not above the law!" he said, and reached out an open hand. We did not give him money for the ticket, which must have fouled his mood. "I know Sicilian mafia! I will turn you to dust particle," he said.

After a moment or so without pay, he left to pick fights with others on the street. He did not succeed in that either.

During another trip, he addressed us as his "best friends," and asked money from Joe, who refused. "Do you want me to make a murder?" he said, apparently offering a service gained from his mafia acquaintance. Joe refused that request as well. Drunken Master has suggested more peaceable help as well, as when he tried to clean the mud off of Jeremy's jeans in front of more than 20 amused onlookers. It was an offer of humblest service. The Sicilians would be proud.

Of Hexes and More Christmas

2008-01-13T06:13:00.001-06:00

Joe Stocker has dubbed Jeremy and me Team Hex. During our first week in Ethiopia, the electricity at our getaway house in Addis died briefly, as did our water. Then, at our home in Awashbuni, we lost the drilling rig and 19 meter hole which Joe had been drilling the previous week.

So we began our well anew, seeing as how our homestead does not have water. And thus began what Joe says was the most difficult well he has drilled in Africa, and he has drilled more than twenty, including two in our area. The well spanned two years (from late December to early January), and we're not even sure it has water yet; we finished drilling, but we have not developed it. However, it's about as deep as other wells in the area, so we're not too worried.

For two weeks, we baked in the mud that splashed on us while working. Baking in mud, we may here note, is not healthy for one's skin. At nights we tried to ease the pain of burnt and cracked skin by applying coats of Vaseline. Even after a long hot shower at the Addis house, where we will be this weekend, I can still see bits of dark coffee grounds (from grinding home-roasted coffee beans) in the cracks of my skin. After twice reaming the well (making it wider) the casing (essentially the wall of the well, a two-and-a-half diameter pipe) still did not fit. So we bought smaller casing, which did fit.

Just as our luck began to change, Team Hex struck again. Well development requires the greatest amount of water. And on the day of development, the school water supply, from which we and much of the rest of the community gets their water, broke down. So we'll to continue our development next week.

Not all has been ceaseless toil. Our neighbors visit daily when we're at Awashbuni, occasionally helping, sometimes staring, but always enthusiastically greeting us. Greetings and conversations, by the way, proceed like happy murder mysteries. People here throw up both of their hands to greet you, as if joyously surrendering to the police. And in conversation, listeners let you know they are following along by periodically gasping, as though you had suddenly revealed the killer's identity. Our most frequent visitors are a group of kids. There is Fatalah, who does a wicked shoulder dance, Degeneh, who has keeps a broad smile while herding his family's cattle, Innarru, always half hidden beneath a large denim jacket, Gamada, Lamacha, and more. We call them The Sandlot.

For evening diversion this past couple of weeks, we read and Joe and I play chess. We made a board out of plywood and charcoal. We use couplings and fittings for pieces.

We've also had welcome respite this past week in the form of more Christmas. Joe received a text message on the 6th from a girl who told him Ethiopian Christmas was on that day, Jeremy and I received a text message from the Ethiopian telecommunications department near midnight of the 7th wishing us a merry Christmas, and our friend Haile the school teacher took us to his church (maybe thirty people congregated for singing and coffee and teaching in a two-room house) and to his home for a Christmas meal with his five brothers and some neighbors on the 8th. Finally, many of our other neighbors of ours celebrated on the 9th, the official date. If we include December 25, that's five days of Christmas. Of course, we worked most of those days, drilling as usual, as we did on New Years. Even so, here's to a bountiful season of Christmases!

In addition to drilling and Christmasing, we taught a group - whom Joe had already taught to drill - to install cheap pumps, and we helped our village test a thresher for their staple grain crop.

The story of the thresher serves as a noteworthy case study in Ethiopian life and culture. An organization raised funds to obtain the thresher for the community. For six years, the thresher remained where the organization members left it, untouched, underneath a shady grove where the elders of the community often gather. No one knew how to work the machine, and no one tried. Finally, Joe operated the machine and adjusted it to thresh their grain, so that the community could test the thresher. The machine, ready for testing, stayed under the shady grove, untouched, for another six months.

Finally, about two weeks ago we took the thresher out from under the shady grove and tested it with grain from Haile and his neighbors. Within an hour, the machine did half a week's worth of intensive labor. The community decided to return the thresher, never to use it again. No, I do not understand either. Even if it means a full week of threshing, sometimes habit outweighs efficiency.

Yet I suppose this is not so strange, that habit should make us comfortable with where we are, even when we know there is somewhere else we should be. Some habits, however, can also help keep us where we should be, although such habits might more aptly be called disciplines. And sometimes, a habit may have value in itself. It is very American, after all, to streamline everything we do. Perhaps there is unconscious wisdom in rejecting the thresher and keeping the slower pace.

Of Christmas and Good Neighbors

2007-12-25T15:35:00.001-06:00

Merry Christmas! We're sitting in our get-away house in Addis, enjoying the small pleasures of Space Cadet Pinball and the hit drama adventure Lost. Our socks still hang on the fireplace mantle, suspended by black electrical tape. And our ingenuity with the socks did not go unrewarded. Santa left us one birr, worth about a dime. We're hoping for another birr for his return on the official Ethiopian Christmas, Jan. 8.

The birr notwithstanding, it enough of a gift to rest after a long week in the Awashbuni village, the community about an hour south of Addis where we will spend most of our time. We played the part of second-generation homesteaders over the past week, tidying our mud house and drilling a well for our water.

Before we left for Awashbuni, when we first arrived, we spent a few days in Addis buying supplies and running errands, which sent us driving throughout the city. Our area of Addis appears to be under permanent construction. It's as though a construction crew began building an edifice a dozen stories high, and then said, decisively, "We should try to repair the street." Yet after immediately abandoning the building and ripping up the road, the construction crew - unburdened by logic and perspective - said, "Hey, we should build another building," immediately abandoning the road and starting a new building, and repeating the cycle. Thus incomplete buildings, dozens of stories high and with no apparent construction crews, grace every other block, and every other street is blocked off by construction crews ripping us adjacent streets.

Fortunately, Joe Stocker (our host and well driller extraordinaire, who has been in Ethiopia for a year now) has at his disposal a beaten Landcruiser with the gear power necessary to climb trees. Thus we were able to scale the piles of rubble and drive over what might, some day, be a road. Neither does the shortage of roads and abundance of construction hinder Addis' mass of people and vehicles. Cars charge and dodge each other like pedestrians running on a crowded sidewalk, and pedestrians on the actual sidewalks stand in front of street-side shoppes as though bumper-to-bumper.

Beyond those errands, we let our jet lag dissipate during our first couple of days in Ethiopia, at the Getaway house. Joe Stocker and a few others have rented the house. Ben (from St. Louis, Mo.) and Pepo (from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia), a recently married couple, are two of our housemates. Well, three technically - Pepo is expecting and due in April. Anthony and Amber also live at the house but we have yet to meet them. Both are in the United States at the moment.

The house is also somewhat staffed. Ayo cooks for us. She cooked for the house when the U.S. missionaries who rent out the house still lived in it. And Haile is our guard. He is 26-years-old, and he was raised in a small village outside Addis, where his family lives. Such is all I gathered from our conversations, from his smatterings of English and my complete ignorance of Amharic, the dominant language of Ethiopia, most used especially around the capital. Haile went with us to Awashbuni on our first visit there, to see what we would need and to test our plaster.

Awashbuni

If passengers on a bus, on a southerly route away from Addis, yawned at the appropriate time, said passengers would never see our little community, Awashbuni. Even if they did see it, they would not know what they had seen. The town is not marked. It's scarcely a school and a few mud houses beside a major southern highway, with the rest of the community living in the distant fields, accessible by dirt back roads. Nevertheless, it's our home for the next few months, and we've done our best to make it feel as such.

We painted the mud walls with a thin coat of white plaster, hung a dining table top from the rafters (we didn't have the table's legs), organized the shop (a container with our tools and pipes), installed a new door and set up a bunk bed. We did not do this alone. Our neighbors, our landlord and his sons, and the gang of boys that hang around our house all pitched in one way or another.

So many come by every day that I'm beginning to understand our area of Ethiopia as being an extrovert's paradise. At first I thought that everyone came simply to see the new neighbors, to see what the farenge (the white foreigners) were doing. But then one sees everyone out and about in groups, conversing on the side of the main highway, and when one realizes that every errand (such those we engaged in to take the carpenter looking for tools to install our door) becomes a social occasion, a chance for deep and involved conversation with shop owners, one suspects a deeper, cultural influence in the constant stream of visitors.

We even had a sort of house warming coffee ceremony during one afternoon of painting. An evangelist who works in the area and a school teacher and another guy, all of them non-Orthodox believers, brought over some coffee beans, water, a coffee pot and some porcelain cups. They roasted the beans, pounded them into grounds and served us three boils of coffee arabica. Later that week we went to a market place and bought our own coffee set, so now I make the coffee in the mornings by the same ceremony. On Christmas Eve, Pepo and I had a boil off. She did the coffee ceremony in the afternoon, and I boiled in the evening. The judges (Jeremy, Joe and Ben) were gracious enough to call it a close match, although Pepo clearly won. No worries. I have several more months to practice.

Our most frequent visitor is Haile, not Haile the guard, but Haile the school teacher, the school teacher who was present during the house-warming coffee. Haile, one might notice, is a popular name. It was the name of the last Emperor before the Communist Derg. Who would not want to name their child after the Emperor?

Haile helps direct the school down the highway and teaches chemistry there, as best he can with few supplies, he says. For now he has been our language teacher, instructing us in both Amharic and Oromo, the local language.

We're also indebted to Haile for his hospitality. He invited us to eat at his homestead, where he has several cattle, a bee hive for honey and a large field of teff. Teff is a grain used to make injera. And injera is a sour, flat, spongy bread which looks something like a flimsy tortilla used to grab the food of most traditional dishes. Beneath the circular thatch roof of his circular mud house, Haile brought us injera and a cup of curdled milk mixed with chili powder. We dipped the injera in the mixture - which tasted as good as it looked bad - and read the newspapers on the walls. Yellowed pages listing old Russian stock exchange prices, British tabloids describing the latest Tony Blair scandal: all such old newspapers are used to wallpaper homes in our area.

As for our usual meals, we're on a steady diet of rice, french fries, beans, eggs and sardines. However, we often eat in the nearby town of Tulubolo, at the Millennium Cafe, where we engage in a special ritual: we ask for the menu, point to items on the menu, understand from our waitress that every one of the items in question are not available, and end up ordering a fried egg sandwich and french fries, affectionately known as "chips."

The meals have nevertheless sustained us well, and next week they will be put to the test again - we have some catching up to do on our well. In fact, we lost our well. Joe had been drilling several days before we arrived and we drilled a couple more days, using the Landcruiser's wheel to pull rope for us since we don't have a full crew. And the day before Christmas Eve, we found that the hole had caved in, and we had left the drilling rig in the hole the night before, so we lost the hole and the drilling rig.

But we're a tenacious bunch here at Water For All; we've lost rigs and holes before. And good cheer in the face of such circumstances feels appropriate when you have two Christmases to celebrate.

Of Ethiopian History and Underground Blogging

2007-12-14T23:29:00.001-06:00

[Written December 12]

You might remember Ethiopia as the place where, according to our mothers, there resided children who would love to eat the food that was still left on our plates, obliging us to eat it. And we, being considerate, thoughtful children, gravely surveying our beets and mashed potatoes, said "Can we send it to them instead?"

Such is Ethiopia's popular media reputation of being the quintessential African nation filled with starving children. This reputation isn't far off, since some areas still suffer from desperate poverty, even though the famine of the 1980s has long since past. However, the popular media reputation is misleading in referring to Ethiopia as quintessentially African; Ethiopia somewhat prides itself on being completely unlike the rest of the continent.

The country has its own ancient Coptic church, Italian cultural influences due to Mussolini's WWII conquest of the country, a beautiful populace with striking Caucasian features and dark skin tones, and the famous Emperor Haile Selassie, the beloved monarch with claims to the throne of Solomon and adoration from Rastafarians who believe he was Jesus' reincarnation. The king ruled for more than 50 years until the Communist Derg overthrew him in 1974. Communist monuments still color the capital city of Addis Ababa, testaments to the Derg's legacy, which ended with a rebel overthrow in 1991, so that Ethiopia now calls itself a federal democratic republic.

Ethiopia even has its own calendar, for which reason the country recently celebrated their second millennium. It is the year 2,000 here, and the city still has decorations on display: strings of lights strung down from street lamps, hotels with red, green and yellow (the colors of the Ethiopia flag) lights covering its façade, and "Ethiopia 2000" banners suspended alongside the road we traveled.

I first thought the lights might've been part of Christmas decorations. Jeremy and I had seen decorations at every airport, from Austin to Chicago to Heathrow. (We stopped in Amman Jordan for refueling but stayed on the plane, so I cannot vouch for that airport's décor). But Joe Stocker - our host, WFA's well driller extraordinaire, at whose service we will be for this trip - explained the millennium celebration while we drove away from our 4:30 am arrival at the airport.

Apparently the government added to the celebration by allowing people to use text messages again. During elections a while back, people used text messages as a form of protest, sending mass texts that told cohorts to go out side at certain times of the night and yell in unison.

The government told their communications minister to shut down cell phone text messaging capabilities. The minister said he could not do that. The government said it would replace the minister with someone who could. The minister shut down cell phone text messaging.

But now it is back, so please yell with me in approval, if you would like, at 2 a.m. on Thursday, Central Standard Time.

Unfortunately, the government does not allow blogging or blog viewing. As you might've guessed, there are ways around that, but if you try to type in a blog address directly into the URL, or even click on a blog's link, whether from a search engine or another site, the system is designed so that the page will never load. Kind of adds to the thrill of blogging from this end.

At the moment, a few hours after our arrival, we are in Addis Ababa, at a rented house with several other residents, good friends of Joe. Soon we will go to the village about an hour away where we will continue Joe's drilling tomorrow and aid the community with some chores today. That's what it's looking like, but we'll see. After a couple dozen hours of travel touching four continents, we might just rest for the day.

Checking My Motives

2007-12-04T19:35:00.000-06:00

I am going to Ethiopia to teach the rural poor how to drill water wells.

Does that sound pretentious or egotistical?

I've been asking myself lately how to put away pride, specifically that self-applauding narcissism which seems rampant in humanitarian and philanthropical organizations, that which would cause us not to care if the world were saved unless we were its saviors; that which would let our good works so shine before men that they may see us in heaven.

To borrow the Apostle Paul's framework:

Though I bestow several months of my time upon the poor, and though I give my body to be burned beneath an equatorial sun amid intense boughts of well-drilling, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.

And though I write of it with the pen of poet laureates and muses, and have not love, I am become as the screenplay for Gigli, or a script for a sit-com that aired only two episodes.

Part of me thinks I can dimiss the problem. Regardless of my spiritual health, people will still get much needed water and - in learning the technology itself - much more needed empowerment. All I would need to do, therefore, is worry about the well-drilling and let my ego go wherever it wants.

Yet something is missing if well drilling is all we care about. It neglects the larger spiritual scheme. Love is not content to help people with mere material blessings, things that allow them only to die comfortably. Love desires them to fully live. This why we engage in holistic ministry. Without Christ's life, humanitarian services become evanescent and vain in the sense of Ecclesiastes. Works without faith are dead.

And because of the ministry's spiritual foundation, because of our life's spiritual foundation, I do worry about my motives. I pray to always preach the Gospel, as has been said, regardless of whether or not I use words, (yet without fear of using words); and that God's Kingdom would shine through me, and therefore inspite of me.

Thus I search for safeguards against self-righteousness, and at the moment I believe I see two of them. May I report people's individual stories, as a reminder that we do not go to amalgamous "Africans" whom we must rescue ("philanthropists love anthropods," one writer has said), but to men and women whom we can love and brothers and sisters for whom we can pray, and who can pray for us.

Second is that Jeremy Boucher and I cannot do this alone, and we do not do this alone. We are taking you with us. We are almost nothing without daily intercession from our fellow saints. Please pray for us. More than anything else, we need prayer, and I mean that. The world may think prayer absurd, and it may throw its temporal wealth and power to fix problems, but may we rely instead on the strength of God's community and his undeserved grace.

So I pray to put the stories of the people with whom we will work ahead of my own. And I pray for humility in recognizing that my part in this ministry is mine only insofar as it is ours, and ours only insofar as it is God's. And so we go to our brethren and neighbors in Ethiopia, with a love that is not our own, praise God!

From Dry to Drenched, Our Final Well in Bolivia

2007-11-04T20:16:00.000-06:00

On Halloween, we finished a well near San Julian that we had begun a week earlier, the Monday before we left for Antofagasta. This is our last well, our eighth well, in Bolivia.

We drilled the well for free, for an outgoing farmer whose left arm is crippled and whose father passed away last year. According to a neighbor, he was crippled because someone accidentally shot him in the head. He lives alone as a quidante (a keeper or steward) of a property, but he also has his own field which he rents out to others to plant.

Since he lives near the previous well we did in San Julian, the cursed two-week well, we thought it might take a few days to finish. We finished that day, 150 feet in two days altogether.

The rig's quick descent surprised us all. It was like setting off on a roadtrip from LA to NYC, and after a few hours, seeing signs for Nashville.

Even after our pipe popped off and set us fishing it out for a couple of hours. We drilled well into the dark and finished the well.

Allan returned that day with Don Teofilo. The two of them had stayed in Antofagasta for a while, Don Teofilo to make sure the water club knew what they were doing, and Allan to test whether he was ready to be out on his own in the field. And McGee returned from Santa Cruz, where he had spent his day off. (We took off Tuesday, the day before Halloween). And Meghan was with us, so we finished with a complete team.

The next day, we went to develop the well, to flush out the mud and so forth to get water, but storms blew in and kept us from finishing. The storms continued the next day, and the next day, and the next. The dry season seems to have finished off as quickly as our last well.

The rains have continued till now (Sunday). So we spent the remainder of our week making pumps in the workshop here at San Julian. Our welding has improved, meaning that we can make the metal melt in more or less the right places, meaning that our workshop is not yet in flames.

Hopefully this coming week the weather will clear up enough for us to be able to install a pump at the farmer's well.

Field Day at Antofagasta

2007-11-04T20:15:00.000-06:00

On Sunday afternoon, during our trip to Antofagasta, after having drilled two wells, Don David took us out for a field trip. Don David was the young'un of the water club, around 30 years old. Being the ablest and most outgoing, Don Teofilo picked him to be the well-drilling expert of the club, a sort of point man who could be responsible for knowing exactly what to do and who could teach other water clubs how to drill.

Don David took us to a nearby river, or what the dry season had left of it. It was not so much a river as it was a series of ponds. We loaded all of our drill pipe and casing for the next well onto his tractor and dropped it off at his place, at a nearby community. Then we drove to the river.

His son, his younger brother and his younger brother's friend went with us. And they fished the ponds with nets and caught about 12 fish in all. We grilled them for lunch and afterwards lounged about and climbed nearby trees. Dona Amalia climbed with us, and Sergio found a pearl in a river conch. Productive post-lunch activities all in all.

Don David's brother and the friend went to another pond down river (or it could have been up river; it wasn't flowing so I'm not sure) to fish. They had been gone for a long while, so Sergio, Jeremy, Don David's son and I set out to find them. We walked along the banks dodging vines and mud pits and such, and on the banks we spotted some baby aligators. I ran up around the bank to chase the alligators back down, and Don David, who came up behind us, caught the baby alligator. We played with it and took pictures of it and then released it to the nearest pond.

We finally found Don David's brother and his friend. They had caught about 30 more fish, two of them piranahs, one of which had bit the friend on the finger and left a chunk of flesh hanging. Yet he didn't say a word; he didn't even wince. Apparently that sort of thing happened to him quite often when fishing. He had a band-aid on from a fish bite he received the day before.

On Monday, we left for home, San Julian, all of us except for Allan and Don Teofilo. Don Teofilo wanted to stay for one more well to make sure that the club knew what it was doing, and Allan wanted see what it was like to be out on his own with a water club. They plan to return Wednesday.

We left on a micro, the public transport. There was barely even standing room before we got on, nevermind after. This bus also broke down. Fortunately, the driver stopped and repaired the leaking fuel line before the vehicle exploded into flames, and we made it to Montero, a large city in northern Bolivia. From there we hired taxis to take us to Santa Cruz, where we droppped off Matt McGee who wanted to take his day off, Tuesday, in the city with his friends from the International Mission Board's ESL classes.

The rest of us ate lunch in Santa Cruz at a Chinese chicken restaurant that had two large screens showing a martial arts action movie. The restaurant offered four types of fried chicken: economic chicken, a quarter chicken, a half chicken, and an entire chicken. We chose the economic chicken.

Now we're back in San Julian, with another well to drill, one we began last Monday, before we left for Antofagasta.

Of Homesteads and Mangoes

2007-10-30T09:16:00.000-05:00

Our team drilled two wells the week of Oct. 23 in Antofagasta, a 47-year-old community in northern Bolivia with a rough history. Fire burnt the town to the ground one year and then the area suffered three years of flooding.

Many residents thus left to surrounding communities, making Antofagasta as small as it is old, with only a handful of families. At least six of the nine official water club members had more than 70 years of age.

But while several club members had hired teenagers or brought their sons to help drill, the old men worked as hard as anyone. Hard work was all they knew. For decades they've established their homesteads, "back when everything was jungles, forests and footpaths," the owner of the second well said.

The community already had two wells about a quarter mile or more from the homesteads, so the need for drinking and clothes washing water wasn't dire. Their supply simply didn't help the aforementioned livestock, and it was a hassle to transport. For instance, one club member's sole job was that of bringing wheelbarrows of water jugs to the second drill site, about a quarter mile away. And to flush out the second well, we helped roll barrels of water from the first well.

The community's two wells are artesian, meaning that pressure from the confined aquifer (confined aquifers are not fed from rain water) pushes the water to the surface. Water rises to the surface and flows out like a spring.

Don Teofilo - our well-drilling guru, who arranged the water club a week earlier - has drilled hundreds of wells but never an artesian one, until he went with us to Antofagasta. Both of our 115-foot wells, four days of drilling and developing total, came out artesian.

Also with us were Kim Edlund and my dad. Kim and my dad stayed with us until Sunday morning; they had to catch Kim's flight back to the United States. Meghan stayed in San Julian to let her foot heal, so she spent the week helping my sisters with their homeschooling. Sergio, Don Teofilo's right-hand man, came with us too, as did Dona Amalia, who helps my mom cook and clean at San Julian, offered to come with us and cook since she had never been to the Yapacani province.

We drilled the first well at the homestead of our host, Don Roberto Gomez. He, his two brothers (all of them bachelors), their 99-year-old father, their niece and her son all compose one of the two families that regularly attend the Baptist/only church in Antofagasta. The church resides on Gomez's land, and we had services Saturday and Sunday night, hoping to be a bit of encouragement for a church that has seen so many of its members move away.

We set up camp at the Gomez cow pasture, which provided us with a beautiful view of open fields and palm trees silhouetted by sunset. The only downside: cows, horses and/or roosters chose to wake at 4:30 a.m., and their stirring often obliged us to do the same. One horse, for example, regularly attempted to eat our tents. We would shoo it away until the late morning hour of 6 or 6:30.

Dona Amalia stayed at a brick room which she used as her kitchen. And Sergio and Don Teofilo set up their tents on the porch outside her door. We ate on that porch for every meal.

Between Dona Amalia's cooking and an ample supply of mangoes, hunger was inconceivable. Each lot had several trees loaded with ripe mangoes that dropped from their boughs. For nearly every meal we had a surplus of mangoes, bags of mangoes. During a tractor trip (which I will relate further down) we picked mangoes off of the passing branches with scarcely any effort. If I may summarize: mangoes, mangoes, mangoes.

Word spread that we were drilling and people came from all around. About four people came by wanting to start well clubs, which usually have about 10 members. Taxi and truck drivers pulled up beside us while we walked on the road, and they asked us how they could get water. I kid you not, one man walked eight miles on crutches to ask about getting a well for his homestead.

Everyone wants water, and thus far, two families have gotten it. The artesian flow from the first well measures at about a gallon per minute by the time we siphoned from the well to a pond in the pasture. We put a hand pump on the second well. That family's barrel rolling days are over.

We celebrated my father's and Matt McGee's birthday on Wednesday and Thursday respectively, with chocolate pound cake and trick candles which sparkled but refused to light a second time. One might call them defective, or at least ironic, trick candles.

Of Beards and Revolution

2007-10-19T11:15:00.000-05:00

We've entered week three of the Water For All Internship Program Beard-Off, a tradition begun when Allan shaved and let his beard grow back, and a few of us decided to join him. Meghan has not caught the spirit yet, but I think she's just shy.

Watching our beards grow was almost all we did this past week. We went to Santa Cruz to relax at a mission apartment for two days, and the length of our stay doubled.

Government troops at the airport were shooting tear gas at protesters, so we deemed it unwise to travel during potentially catacysmic unrest.

An article regarding the situation.

The AP story does a good job covering specifics of the actual event, but the presented history of conflict between the eastern provinces and the MAS-controlled government (MAS: Movimiento A Socialismo, Movement Toward Socialism) is much more complicated. It involves President Evo Morales' rule-by-decree to bypass constitutional law, statements from the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez interpreted as violent threats, and so forth.

Fortunately protests of this sort happen on a fairly regular basis. In fact, there is a saying that, "En Bolivia, pasa de todo y no pasa nada." Everything happens and nothing happens. Riots verge on revolution, and then everyone backs off, and there is peace for a while longer.

Of course, at times revolution does occur, as in the violent protests of 2003 that pressured the president, the vice-president and the supreme court justice - who was briefly president - out of office. That was how MAS came to power, after a special election that voted in Evo by a solid majority

Still, the protests were not near as bad as they could have been. Evo's rule has been respected for the most part since his party has tried to work legitimately through a constitutional assembly, and it has not been swamped with scandle.

And things are certainly not as bad as they have been in Bolivia's past. In 1991, Bolivia held the world record for most coup d'etats. I don't know if that has changed.

For now, the situation has calmed again. By God's grace, there is peace in Bolivia. Please pray for continued guidance for Bolivia's leaders.

Everyone went a little stir crazy during our time in Santa Cruz, except for McGee. He made good friends with members of a Southern Baptist Convention missionary group that teaches ESL classes. The mission apartment in which we stayed belongs to the SBC, with whom my parents used to work. And the ESL ministry headquarters at a little house down the street.

The missionary who heads the ESL ministry is the same who brought the evangelism teams to San Julian week before last.

The only times we left the apartment were to wander over to a grocery store or to eat at a nearby restaurant or to take Meghan to the hospital for foot treatment each day. She still limps, but her foot is almost entirely healed! Thank you for your prayers!

In fact, she has returned to San Julian, although she might not come with us on the next length of our journey, just to be safe.

Also with us now, for this past week and for the week to come, is Kim Edlund, former missionary to Bolivia and a dear friend of my dad. He pastors a church near Austin serves as Water For All's U.S. liason. He arrived a couple of days before the airport violence.

Kim is here now to bolster our team's spiritual nourishment with nightly devotionals which, both in Santa Cruz and now here in San Julian, have been welcome refreshments.

He'll be going with us to Antofagasta, in the lush, especially scenic, tropical landscape of Yapacani, about six hours north of San Julian and several hundred miles south of Texas.

Until next time ...

Of Smoke and Wells and Snakes

2007-10-17T13:34:00.000-05:00

SAN JULIAN

Now is the dry season.

Wild fires and slash-and-burn farming produce smoke so thick that it smudges the sun and and blankets the sky. At times, ash floats down like some sort of infernal snow. And the dust. The clouds behind vehicles envelop roadside pedestrians, and some stretches of road require four-wheel drive to steer through their dust-filled ruts.

The Spanish Conquistadors called our area of eastern Bolivia, "the Green Hell." The title is especially appropriate title during our dry season.

So now is when communities and farmers take notice of their neighbor's wells and discover the Water For All (WFA) ministry, headquartered in San Julian, a booming market town of about 5,000 people. Here my mom organizes a cottage industry program for our neighborhood's women, my dad designs and implements affordable technologies for small farmers, and said farmers come to ask about getting water.

The people of the village San Juan de la Cruz, for instance, contacted our neighbor, Don Teofilo (Mr. Theophilus, in Spanish) whom my dad trained to drill and who has drilled more of our wells than anyone else in the world.

Since my parents were still in the United States at the time, my dad sent help to organize a well club in the village. The families of San Juan de la Cruz had drilled six wells by the time my family and our crew of interns arrived, and soon we would help them drill four more.

The Crew

The seven of us include:

Meghan Neal. She left James Madison University in Virginia with a BA in English and an African studies minor, prompting her to find a human needs project that would send her to the continent of her latter studies. Being the only girl in the group did not dissuade Meghan from coming or cull her sense of adventure. She pops out questions and observations without hesitation, studies Spanish rigorously, and has ventured to the market here in San Julian on her own. She is spunky if ever there was spunk.

Rob Glahn also graduated from JMU. He majored in economics and took several African studies classes with Meghan, and so it was that they discovered the WFA program together via the Internet. This is his first trip outside of the United States, although he does have the distinction among us of having traveled to about 150 concerts and nine music festivals. He rarely goes anywhere without a large pair of cheap sunglasses and a bandanna to uphold his curly, red hair, which matches his bushy red beard.

The only other intern with a full beard has been Allan De Laurell, a burly brown beard that gave him the appearance of a jolly lion whenever he laughed. A week into the trip, Allan shaved all of his beard except for the mustache, which gave him an uncanny resemblance to the heroic virtual plumber Mario. Allan graduated University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2003 with an English BA, and, although accepted to graduate school, he decided to become a farmer, so he joined various agriculture programs and organic farming communities around the world until he arrived at the World Hunger Farm in Waco in January 2006.

Kris Hiew likewise came to Bolivia from the WHF. Kris had known Allan since high school in San Diego, California. After graduating high school in 2000, Kris bounced around, as he once said, "from culinary school, to film school, to no school" until he went to the WHF at Allan's invitation in March 2006. Kris and Allan saw my father's well-drilling demonstration at the WHF (my parents trained and lived there before going to the mission field), and together they came.

Thus we have one pair from JMU (Meghan and Rob), another from the World Hunger Farm (Allan and Kris) and finally we have a pair from the Baptist General Convention of Texas' Go Now Missions program: Matt McGee and Jeremy Boucher.

Matt McGee, a BS '07 Hardin Simmons graduate with a degree in accounting and finance, arrived in Bolivia wearing a pair of closed-toed shoes and a shirt tucked into his pants. His shoes are still closed and his shirt remains tucked, by far our most consistent dresser. The camera, however, has been McGee's trademark. He takes pictures of everything that moves, and then everything that doesn't. Most of us have essentially abandoned our photographic equipment and almost wholly depend on McGee's digital documentation. For instance, here is a link to McGee's pictures, an album on Facebook:

http://hsutx.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2012336&l=220b6&id=152600384

McGee has traveled before with the BGCT and so has Jeremy Boucher - a 6' 4'', 190 pound Dublin, Texas native with a mathematics degree from Howard Payne and a Texas accent that rivals only my father's in terms of twang-per-syllable. Along with his usual construction and hardware store summer jobs, Jeremy went to Indonesia in 2006 to help with tsunami relief, and last summer he spent two weeks in Jordan meeting with Muslims in coffee shops to learn about Islam and to present the Gospel if the opportunity arose.

Meghan, Rob, Jeremy and McGee all arrived at Santa Cruz at 8 a.m. with no incident. Not so for Kris and Allan. They took a 41-hour bus ride from Waco to Miami, and then flew to Bolivia via a flight that gave them an 18 hour layover in Lima, Peru. There they met a friendly person who showed them around Lima, took them out to eat, and then decided to let them pay for the meal. Exhausted and cheated, they arrived at their final destination at 5 a.m.

My family let our travelers catch their breath at a hotel where we had been staying. The later arrivals ate breakfast, the earlier ones slept.

Then we whisked them to San Julian by a three-hour, rented bus drive. My mom and dad spoke of lodging logistics on the bus. Our heads bobbed and swayed with the driver's pothole dodging, and the weary voyagers' eyes glazed over - caught between the twin traveler characteristics of wonder and jet lag.

Arrival at San Julian

Every small child on our dirt-road neighborhood poured into my parent's lot to see us. My 12-year-old sister Margarita headed the troop of children once we finished unpacking, and the troop solicited our company for games. One such game is called "baseball," a sport involving bricks for bases, wooden slabs for bats and a series of rules which, through its intricacies, could warm the hearts of bureaucrats across the world.

We played such games even before familiarizing ourselves with our quarters. We guys are sleeping in a house that WFA has rented, located a few plots of land down from my parent's parcel. At my parent's place, there are three building.

One building has two rooms, one for Meghan, and one for the ladies' cottage-industry. Another includes my parents' room, my sisters' room, and a living room area. Connected to that building is an office room, which does in fact have an Internet connection, the connection I am using now. Finally, we have the kitchen and dining area, which includes a bathroom with a shower.

Meghan uses the kitchen shower, and we at the boy's room have the blessing of an "hace-viuda" shower, which translates to "widow-maker." The device is an electrical shower head that heats water as it comes out. Touching the ungrounded appliance delivers a 220 volt shock. We rinse with caution.

Other than our bathroom, the guy's house is essentially one long room with seven beds. Carlos Cruz Perez also lives with us.

Carlos wandered to Bolivia from Colombia and wound up working on well drilling with my dad. He is our instructor, of sorts. He speaks Spanish slowly and clearly, the result of working and befriending other gringos, such as Peace Corp volunteers, and speaking Spanish with people who aren't accustomed to the slang and accent of Colombian Spanish. Carlos has also drilled dozens of wells, and he has trained other people to drill dozens of wells, such as the people at the village where we would go the Monday after our arrival, San Juan de la Cruz.

The First Weekend

The next day, Saturday, my dad took us on a tour of a plot of land where he was experimenting with irrigation and fish ponds. Later in the afternoon, we made trips to the market to shop for groceries that we would need in San Juan de la Cruz.

Saturday evening we played music on guitar and violin and continued playing with the kids. Kris' cheerful antics and gestures have made him especially popular with the children of San Julian. My youngest sister, Marilu, considers him to be the funniest thing she has ever seen in all six years of her life.

Sunday we rested, and my dad gave an orientation in the afternoon: a slide show presentation of the technology and a talk about incarnational ministry, agriculture, sustainability, the necessity of Christianity in human needs efforts, and so forth.

I'm firmly of the opinion that my father could teach collegiate courses in missions, well-drilling geology, church history, animal husbandry, anything you want to learn in agronomy, Bolivian politics and a blend of all of the above, and he can illustrate each element of the technical detail with anecdotes and stories from personal experience. He continually repeats his lectures: during dinner, while he's driving, as we're drilling, etc.

He spoke effortlessly during that Sunday afternoon orientation for four hours.

At night we had church in the thatch-roof building beside my parent's lot. Finally, for the first time during the trip, nostalgia burst my heart that night like the waters of an exploded dam. Clapping and singing songs from childhood. My mind swirled with memories.

I was back.

SAN JUAN DE LA CRUZ

Jeremy almost single-handedly repaired the flat on the way to San Juan de la Cruz. He spent about 40 minutes leveling the ground with a shovel, clearing out a space for the jack to fit beneath the Landcruiser's axle. The rest of us looked for dirt clods and sticks to put in front of the vehicle's wheels and stared out at the fields surrounding us.

We were semi-stranded in the middle of an arid dirt road that ran through the middle of a private ranch. We had two cars, so there was no terrible danger. In fact, the flat only set us back about an hour, an inconvenience.

Had we not been able to use the ranch road, things might have been much, much less convenient. The only other way into the town is by horseback around the ranch, and then by canoe up the San Julian river. The ranch encloses San Juan de la Cruz. Fortunately for us, San Julian's municipal government granted us use of the road, which the owner begrudgingly conceded.

The people of San Juan de la Cruz and the ranch owner have been in a land dispute for several years now.

San Juan de la Cruz, with about 20 families living there, has existed for about 50 years. Its residents say claim papers that entitle them to 325 acres of wilderness beside the river San Julian, in an area that the still-living founder (I'll relate my interview with him later) pioneered and homesteaded. The founder said he gained the title papers with the help of a Catholic priest who brought in a government delegation from the capital.

The ranch claims more than 25,000 acres of land. About four years ago, the owner wanted to claim the unused land of San Juan de la Cruz, land which the homesteaders of the village have not yet developed, a takeover justified, according to village residents, by the you-don't-use-it-you-lose-it school of economics.

Don Ramiro, a San Juan de la Cruz resident, said he and his neighbors peacefully petitioned the ranch developers to please remove your bulldozers from our land. The ranch crew threatened to call in the police if they didn't stop bothering them, so the villagers persisted in bothering them and encouraged them to involve the police.

"They [the ranch crew] kept saying, 'We have papers, we have papers.' And we said, 'Then show us the papers.' Of course they didn't have papers. Where would they have gotten papers? We have the papers," Don Ramiro said.

So after the third petition, the residents of San Juan de la Cruz grabbed their shotguns, rifles, machetes and shovels, surrounded one of rancher's hired gunmen ("the cockiest thug," Don Ramiro said), and ran off him and all the other ranch employees to the nearest town.

That was in 2003, and the ranch owner now allows - again, begrudgingly - the San Juan de la Cruz villagers use of his ranch road to their homes. I knew none of this when we arrived. Everything seem serene, idyllic, and everything was peaceful throughout our stay.

The Day to Day

We set up camp beneath a few mango trees which bordered the central soccer field. Every night we heard the fruit bats screeching at each other in the trees, and every morning the neighborhood livestock, pigs mostly, ruffled around our tents until we were awake enough to shoo them away.

A family lived a few feet to our left, facing the soccer field: three boys of grade-school age, their father, and their mother, whose lack of all but three teeth did not lessen the breadth of her smile. She always smiled, when we left our camp site and when we returned.

A thatch-roof building on our right stored the well materials and groceries we brought. Doña Valvina, Don Ramiro's wife, cooked our meals. We ate breakfast, lunch and dinner at a table outside their one-room house, on their dirt-tiled and thatch-covered porch.

Those meal times at Don Ramiro's served at as excellent opportunities to discuss how our situation compared with various pop-culture films (prompted usually by Kris and sustained by everyone else), what constituted animal cruelty (courtesy of debates between Meghan and Allan, given their observations and interpretations of the condition of livestock and ragged dogs in our area), and how our location "is just like Central Texas" (courtesy of everyone from Texas).

This last topic of discussion never lasted long, but it has become a standard subject for every new area we encounter. For instance, those of us acquainted with Central Texas have seen smoke there before, and there is smoke in San Juan de la Cruz, QED "San Juan de la Cruz is a lot like Central Texas."

The food around the table was also excellent. We brought most of our own food, although on a few occasions we ate emu eggs, emus being a smaller, South American version of an ostrich.

We devoted that entire first day to setting up camp. The next, we went to drill.

I won't say much about the technical process of drilling, although here are more references for any of you who might be interested in one of the most revolutionary forms of empowerment of the rural poor: http://www.waterforallinternational.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptist_well_drilling.

For now, know only that it involves an abundance of mud. It is officially called the Baptist Well Drilling Method because "good Baptist people have supported us and made the technology possible," as my father says. However, the title is also fitting because the method involves well-drilling by immersion.

Every evening we returned to our tents drenched in mud still slick on our clothes, caked on our heads and streaked across our faces. And so it was that almost every evening we washed at the river.

The Rio San Julian was less than 100 yards from our camp site. Everyone uses it for laundry and washing, and so did we, with Jeremy's Red Zone Old Spice Bodywash (we're still waiting for them offer corporate sponsorship). Down river a bit, the villagers told us that there are electric eels, anacondas (sicuris [see-coo-rEEs], people call them here) and sting rays. Fortunately, all we ever felt was cool water at our chests and fine sand beneath our feet.

Allan, unfortunately, did not join us after his first venture into the water, because his back quickly swelled with what looked like hives. He used our portable shower bag after that.

Otherwise, bathing in the river was pleasant. One evening we saw monkeys in the trees, solidifing the impression that we were swimming in the Amazon River Basin, which we were.

Drilling

Given the river in the area, our wells were rather shallow, about 18 to 20 meters (57 to 64 feet), so the drilling itself went quickly. The 10 families of San Juan de la Cruz's well club had drilled six wells on their own already, so they were our teachers. Carlos had taught them well.

Most of what we did that first day, once we made a straight pilot hole, was rowing. About four people constantly pull on a rope to move the entire rig up and down. The inertia picks up the mud in the hole, mud made of water and cuttings from the bottom, and spews it out the top and into a settling pit which recycles water back into the hole.

We switched off rowing with the well club members every so often and reached our depth by noon. Then we put on a larger bit and reemed the hole, that is, made it wider to insert the well casing easily. Then we stuffed the casing into the well. Think of casing as the brick wall that lines a large water well, only in our case the casing is two-inch plastic pipe.

Then we developed the well. We put in piping with a one-way valve on the end, and we slush the water inside to break up clay lining the wall of the hole, thereby increasing the water level and recharge rate of the well. Only after developing the well does one put in a pump, which is made on the spot that the owner can easily take out and repair alone. Then the well is done.

At one well, we interns spent more than half the day developing the well while the San Juan de la Cruz club began drilling the next well.

Only one person at a time could pump out the water at a time, so Meghan, Jeremy and Kris and I sat around the hole, and Rob pumped.

"Feels sort of anticlimactic."

Such was Jeremy's observation, one offered soon after he tossed a dirt clod into the mud of the settling pit. The situation seemed like the end of a bad independent film. Cut to mud, fade, roll credits.

That particular well also felt a bit surreal. A dozen yards from us, with charred palm trees behind him, Allan played guitar and belted out improvised lyrics about water wells, and my dad accompanied him on the fiddle.

All in all, our job was not, is not, sexy. We have no sleek machinery, no push-button operations. We pull on a rope and get soaked in mud. And at the end of the day, another family has water of its own, clean water that is not from the river, and water where it is needed on their fields.

Don Fernando

Earlier that day I had mentioned to Carlos that I would like to interview the founder, Don Fernando. Carlos was well acquainted with everyone in the village. He had taught them to drill during the day, hunted with them on the river at night and entertained the children that constantly followed him, so much so that Meghan dubbed him "defender of children" one evening while he let a few little girls braid his long, black hair.

Thus Carlos set up the interview with Don Fernando on my behalf, and Jeremy and Meghan sat in on it. We entered his home, a thatch-roof house like everyone else's, and he greeted us from his hammock, swinging softly. I sat on the ground nearest to him so that his stories would register clearly on my hand-held recorder. His granddaughters brought seats for Jeremy and Meghan.

Dim candle light cast a shadow over his eyes, but it couldn't hide their twinkling. He smiled throughout the hour-long talk, proud that his village was growing and proud that his sons had defended their land.

Don Fernando was a peon about 30 years ago, part of the Bolivan patronage system, a feudal-like arrangement officially discontinued in the 1950s which gave the landowner (the patron) ownership over all of the families living on his land. One evening, Don Fernando and his patron had an argument about Don Fernando's drinking habits, and Don Fernando punched his patron in the face.

He promptly left the patron and moved near present-day San Juan de la Cruz. However, another patron claimed hold over Don Fernando and his family, so Don Fernando said to his father-in-law, "Let's move out, far away, where no one will ever bother us."

Thus he left to where San Juan de la Cruz is now, and with the help of a Catholic priest whom he befriended, he officially secured the land.

He invited friends and family members to his land, and the village began to grow. In 1993, the village was officially named.

Don Fernando is also renowed for his stories about snakes. One of them was believable, and the other, you decide.

He killed a 30-foot snake while it was asleep, cut its head off with two swings of his machete. He swung his hands around the room to describe how the snake coiled and writhed in its death throes. It hissed even without a head, he said, like a pinched tire. And he was adamant about how got a bad deal selling the snake skin.

He told of another story about two brothers who went to a marsh to kill a seven-headed snake. The Bolivian hydra chased the boys up a tree, and they shot it from the branches. The snake got so mad that it caused a terrible storm that flooded the area. (Anacondas always cause rain when they're mad).

The snake was mortally wounded, and was later found washed up on a ranch, dead. Don Fernando went to sell tobacco to the ranch owner and he described their exchange like this:

"I went to visit the rancher and he said, 'Hello,' and I said, 'Hello,' and he said, 'What can I do for you?' And I said, 'Oh, nothing.' And he said, 'What are you selling?' And I said, 'Tobacco.' And he said, 'How much?' And I said, '20 Bolivianos for the kilo.' And he said, 'Come out back. I want to show you something.'"

The rancher showed him his new chicken coop, made from the seven-headed snake's rib cage.
I thought the story was ridiculous. There is no way you would sell a kilo of tobacco for 20 Bolivianos.

I gave Meghan and Jeremy brief translations of the stories after the interview since neither of them understood Spanish very well. Yet all of us agree that the night was especially meaningful, sitting at the feet of a true homesteader, among the last of a generation.

Thursday's Service

Thursday night we had a church service. There is no church as of yet in San Juan de la Cruz, although several families had been regular attenders in their towns of origin. Some small villages hold church services every night of the week and then all day Saturday and Sunday. There is simply nothing else to do.

So we sang songs, Matt McGee gave his testimony, my dad gave a devotional, and we gave everyone marshmellows to roast over our campfire at the end of the service. Almost everyone came.

The kids had been there already. They had gathered around earlier when several of us began an impromptu drum circle around the fire. Rob was especially excited about the drum circle. The old iron pan he brought just for such an occasion did not go to waste.

The people of San Juan de la Cruz were just as excited about the service. As one might suspect, people asked to have a church service every night. And many requested "just one more song" as we ended.

Week Numero Dos

A few wells remained to be dug when the week was finished, but we returned to San Julian for the weekend and Monday. Monday was the 24 of September holiday, the department of Santa Cruz's foundation day.

So the following Tuesday we returned and finished the last well. Then we dug around the two community wells at the school and one out a club member's field and sealed them off with bentonite, a fine clay available world-wide and commonly used for well-drilling. That would assure the purity of the water in the well, even though the aquafer we drilled into is contained, meaning that it is fed from the mountains and not from rainwater.

We also celebrated my birthday that following week, on the 26th, with chocolate cupcakes and trick candles.

That night, fires burned in the forest across the river. It looked like the glow from a small city on the horizon, and exploding trees kept many of us awake. A dense fog of smoke greeted us the next morning, and bits of ash fell from the sky.

The haze was especially thick after that, and it would be a while before we saw any stars or blue sky. Even before the giant fire came we had only seen one or two specks, except for one night.

It was about 2 a.m., and I was on my way to the outhouse beside the school. I saw a large tarantula walking beside me, and I didn't bother it. It may have been out on the same business. I stopped for a moment to let the tarantula walk a safe distance away from me, and I looked up while I waited. There was the southern sky.

I hadn't seen those stars in long time. They reminded me of the people one sees regularly on street corners or in coffee shops or at grocery stores, the unknown acquaintences whose appearances serve as a comforting testimony that amid chaos, something is going as it should.

THE TWO-WEEK WELL

We stayed in Santa Cruz after San Juan de la Cruz for a bit of r&r.

Carlos, at the recommendation of one of his Peace Corp friends, found us a six-dollar-per-night hotel room. The eight of us fit into the habitation: one room with five beds, some extra mattresses and a bathroom.

Saturday we visited the zoo. We witnessed the jaguars' feeding and gave soda to monkeys that had escaped their cages and stayed in the area. Beyond that, we ate out and walked around the central plaza.

All in all, the trip was a welcome respite from drilling, something we would need for our next well.

The Situation

We've drilled in the rocky hills of Rabondo in western Kenya, beside the Langano lakes in central Ethiopia, in the clay and silt of Asosa in western Ethiopia, and in the caliche rock of West Texas, and nothing compares with the well we drilled just outside of San Julian.

Doña Tomasa, a woman whose husband left her with five kids, had paid someone to drill a well, and that person never showed. So we drilled her a well for free.

She volunteered to cook us lunch everyday: a heaping plate of rice, chicken or beef, rice, more rice, potatoes and rice. The food was good, although at times it was too much, and we discretely recruited her piglets to help us clean our plates.

Don Teofilo came with us on this well. He lives adjacent to us in San Julian, and my dad contracts him for moments such as these, to help with the WFA program. Sergio also came with us, a long-time aquaintance of Don Teofilo. Besides being an excellent welder and shop worker, Sergio too has drilled dozens of wells.

We used a motorized rig since there weren't enough of us to pull. A full crew uses about 10 people. Two people stay at the front of the well, one to push down the rig once the pullers give slack, and another to pour water into the hole as the rig advances. Four people pull, and another four stand by to replace the pullers and to switch out drill stem, that is, adding one pieces of PVC to go deeper.

The motorized pulls the rope for us, so the drilling takes the same amount of time, but one needs only the aforementioned rig pushers and pipe changers. And every day a few of us went to a leech-filled pond on the side of the road to scoop up several barrels of water for drilling.

With Don Teofilo, Sergio and the motorized rig on our side, we hoped to finish within a few days. That was not to be.

Re-Learning to Drill

It took a while for us to adjust to the motorized rig, and then we learned not to screw on our drill stem too tightly, and then we learned when we needed to thin the water, and then we learned how to use our wrentches properly, so forth and so on. We learned much and our drilling advanced slowly. We pounded for about 10 hours one day and went through about eight meters of clay. But at least we were advancing.

In the evenings we returned to our place in San Julian, 10 minutes away, and watched the Band of Brothers mini-series on DVD during the evenings, or simply used email and Skype at the office. The routine persisted until Thursday.

Due to poor threading on one of the pipes, 52 meters (166 feet) of PVC and metal were stuck in the ground that Thursday.

We 'fished' for the pipe with a tool, which didn't seem like much of a problem - we had easily performed that operation earlier in the day. But we lost the fishing tool to hole. So we made another fishing tool to get out the first fishing tool, and after dark, we finally recovered the entire rig. We were ecstatic. We posed for group pictures that reveal us drenched in mud, laughingly and smiling. Our hole was intact, our drilling rig safe and our spirits lifted.

The next day we lost the hole and our rig. Surging sands from beneath the clay shot up and collapsed around the pipe at 65 meters. So we started another hole.

We worked ten-hour days for six days the next week. We watched nothing in the evenings. By Wednesday we reached 51 meters, and Thursday we lost 30 meters to a mud cave-in. So we re-drilled through that for two more days.

If we were superstitious we might've abandoned the hole. A small puppy fell into Dona Tomasa's fire and burned to death during the first week. And the second week, Jeremy threw a stick at some pigs to shoo them awayand the stick broke a pig's back, paralyzing its hind legs. We offered to pay for the pig, but Doña Tomasa wouldn't hear of it. The pig was soft, she said.

In the Meantime

In the meantime, a church group from Santa Cruz came out Friday through Sunday to do "campana" (revival) in the evenings with our church. They performed skits and played music at night and went lot to lot in our neighborhood, evangelizing during the afternoons.

I did not witness much of the revival. Saturday night Meghan's foot swelled from a small, infected cut she got earlier that day. She hadn't been wearing shoes because of found a tarantula in her footwear. We're wearing shoes at all times now.

Rob and I went with my mom and Meghan to Santa Cruz where the doctors put her on antibiotics and drained pus from her foot every day for five days. Now is the forth day.

Rob and I returned to San Julian Sunday afternoon and my mom and Meghan stayed in Santa Cruz. The infection has stopped spreading but recovery is slow. Please pray for her.

Monday we finished drilling. We cased the well. That same day the sun came with a deep blue sky. We had seen bits of blue sky since then, and one evening last week we even saw our first sunset, three weeks into our trip. Usually the sun disappears into the smoke at about 5 p.m.

On Monday, however, the sun set fire to clearly distinguishable clouds. Yellows, reds and oranges burned, and they burned without smoke. The sky is clear even now.

That evening we celebrated by falling asleep to Kris' favorite movie (Kris fell asleep too): Jingle All the Way, the 1990s Christmas comedy starring Schwarzenager and Sinbad.

We missed Meghan that evening, but when we went to Santa Cruz the following day, we let her know her swollen foot was not in vain. The well was done, cased at a little deeper than 66.5 meters. May the record stand that we cased our seemingly diabolic well outside San Julian at 213 feet, 66.6 meters.