CHRISTMAS PRESENT MEANS WATER

December 19, 2008

Dearest Youth of St. Anne and St. John,

I pray this Christmas Season finds you in joy for the gift of the Christ Child we welcome in this season of Peace. I trust you are enjoying a wonderful time with your families and friends...and as I hear the weather is rather WINTERY....I hope you have lots of fun in the snow...and ice...and RAIN???

Today I send my Christmas present to you all. The work has begun on the rainwater cisterns at the dispensary in Rugari!

HURRAH and PRAISE GOD FROM WHOM ALL BLESSINGS FLOW!!!

We signed the contract on November 28th and then after another week of discussions with Roger NDAGIJE, director of HEALTH SERVICES for CARITAS Goma, we began the actual work on Friday, December 5th.

By the time I first visited on Friday, December 12th, the foundation was close to being finished.

This week the foundation rests while the engineer travels to Kampala, Uganda to purchase the materials he needs to build the gutters.

The people who are hired to work number 16 and include workers to shape stones, carry lumber, mix cement, carry water in jerry cans, and to cut and fabricate the iron rebar stabilizers.

All in all people are happy on every account.

They are finding good employment and their dispensary will be improved with the wonderful gift of water.

The gift of water…of course one of the problems of this project is that there is no water, but to build with cement you need water. What we are doing, is what everyone does to get water.

Women of the village to hike up the mountain to the water source just past the parish. They fill gerry cans and carry them back down the mountain. The only difference is that we are paying them 200 Congolese francs per jerry can…do you realize this is only about 33cents of a dollar!!! They hike up the mountain and carry two gerry cans at a time...filled with HEAVY LOADS and they receive $0.66 for the trip...

The others who are employed as cement masons at the work site are being paid $5 per day for their work.

They are being paid every Saturday at the end of the workweek. This means that each man working is earning $30 per week. The unskilled laborers are being paid $15 per week. This is a help to them for many accounts and we thank God for this blessing of work and of water supply at the dispensary.

The other beautiful thing happening is the movement of people returning to their farms up on the mountain!!!

I took a hike up the mountain on Saturday the 13th of December and so enjoyed seeing the sites, the flowers, the fresh tilled soil, the cattle grazing, and people happily working and setting up their homes again. These are industrious people who want to get something done and who continually pray for peace.

Peace is one of the common greetings we use during the Christmas Season and yet for those of us who live in so much peace in our homeland, the word peace can become a pretty casual thing. We use it every Sunday in our worship when we greet each other in the Peace of Christ, but when people have lived without peace, without freedom, without true democracy for so many years here in DRC….well, you get my drift….PEACE. One of the huge realities of PEACE is also FORGIVENESS and there will need to be a lot of that here in DRC before we will have that true and lasting PEACE.

December 26, 2008

POSTSCRIPT: Just had to add a couple of photos to the story. Yesterday was at the worksite and got this photo of the work progressing. They are now over 1 meter up on the walls of the cistern.

And here is a photo of my first ever English Class at the Parish. Far left is Joseph, secretary of the parish. Next to me Leonard, evangelist of the parish, then one of the students from the secondary school and finally to the right one of the professors of the secondary school, John.

We had a really fun class...hope we get to have some more days like that. In the PEACE of CHRIST,

Jackie