Water is Life
It rained two nights ago, and by “rained” I mean POURED. For almost two hours the rain beat down on the orphanage’s tin roof. The first thought in the minds of our kids is to grab the soap and run outside. God is providing a free shower. The first thought of the group that was here (T.H.E. Mission Team) was to head outside to enjoy the children and grab a quick shower themselves. The first thought on my mind was to fill the water tanks (and everything else we could find) to capture as much of this free water as we could.
You see, in Haiti, water really is life. Having water in our cistern can mean the difference between:
- filtering the water we catch or having to get water from a questionable source;
- making ice with our ice machine or having to purchase ice at a store;
- using fresh rainwater to shower and wash with or having to use our salty well water;
Haiti has a way of making you re-evaluate the things that you think are important. I rarely think about water in the US – where it comes from and how it flows safely from my faucet. In Haiti, water is never far from my consciousness - how much water is in the cistern or where is my water bottle and is it full?
The lack of access to clean drinking water is one of the major health issues of our time and most people in North America just don’t “get it”. For a lot less than you think the whole community of Bercy could be changed forever by installing desalination units on salty wells and using large volume water purification systems. By giving to the Jacksonville Baptist Association, or to People for Haiti, you can help bring clean drinking water to our orphans, our school, and those surrounding our compound.
Please pray for the Cabaret Baptist Children’s Home as we face this issue everyday. Pray also for the whole community and country surrounding us, many who face far more difficult issues than we do. Pray for God to open your eyes to this worldwide problem and ask if he would like for you to get personally involved in finding a solution.
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The first thought on my mind — what about all those people living in tents?? It starts to drizzle just a little here and my heart goes out to those people (hundreds of thousands) and I am broken.
I’m so sad I missed the “Shower” this trip. I’ll have to send you the pictures from the last trip of our fun in the rain with the kids at Cabaret. As refreshing as it is for us it’s still heartbreaking for all those in the tent city. I feel guilty for being so excited about the downpour because while I know it’s great for the orphanage and many others I also know it means a long, wet, sleepless night for many, many others.
This does create a tension between two opposing needs. We are concerned for the people living in tents, that’s why we have 100 tents on their way here right now. But the truth is, that even the people in tents need water to drink. Last week we helped a lady (who was living in a tent) get water because the water truck refused to go to her neighborhood. Please keep praying, but praying that it doesn’t rain just adds a different problem to the Haitian people.