Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Dec 8, 2016

We walked Down The Hole this morning while it was "cool" probably mid 70's. Oh what
a beautiful job Samuel and Brother Thomas have done. They created a huge spring box
with two 10,000 liter milla tanks on either side of it and have laid tile and a wall to
protect it and a concrete pad that connects the springbox and the two milla tanks
together. Each Milla Tank has 4 taps and they were filled to the top and the spring box
was so full it was spewing water from the overflow valve. This valve is close to the
ground and is perfect for the little children to get their 2 & 3 gallon jugs under it. They
consider this water "waste water" because it is being wasted so they do no charge for
it. However, they are charging 500 Leones for two 5 gallon jerry cans (.14 cents) for
pure drinking water. The children were coming at 2:00 a.m. To fetch water and had to
stand in line for hours when this location was a small dipping pool. Now they get a jerry
can filled in less than 45 seconds. With 8 taps, there is no waiting. The people are
calling this "a miracle". These people have suffered for many years and this relief is
very much appreciated. They are humble and grateful. I get very emotional seeing the
relief these people are getting. God has blessed these people beyond measure. The
project isn't done yet. There are two more water sources up higher in the mountain
that we are going to build small spring boxes and have it gravity- fall down to the big
spring box. We are trying very hard to make sure these people have water during the
dry season. This project has the potential of supplying clean drinking water to over
30,000 people per day. We have another opportunity to do the same thing at South
ridge which is at the bottom of a different mountain.
Walking down the mountain to get to Down the Hole is a very steep grade and the path
is small gravel. It is easy to take a step and go into a slide. Don was walking in front of
me and I was hanging on to his belt and we could hear footsteps behind us coming at a
very fast rate so we stepped aside to let the person pass us. To our amazement it was a
child maybe two years old and he was walking down this path as if it were a clean level
path. His feet were hitting all the protruding rocks and going between rocks only a tiny
foot could get into. To him, this path was a piece of cake. We laughed at ourselves as
we continued going slow, picking the placement of our feet and moving like two old
people.

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