Healing Waters/Aguas de Unidad has an office here and 17 water purification systems serving an average of 35,000 people per day with safe drinking water. By the end of the year we hope to have installed at least four new systems, bringing our total to 21.
Chiapas is a beautiful state too, amazing landscapes and vistas. I arrived here late Sunday night (check out my last blog post to hear about my 18 hour journey from Guatemala.) On Monday morning I headed into the office and started work. We began with a staff meeting which includes an update on what all the staff are doing for the week, a short bible study and prayer time. After that, I jumped right into work with Sebastian, the employee here who manages the relationships with the church partners and their water systems. Sebastian and I spent most of the day working through the process we use to select new communities and church partners for water systems. We have a detailed initial study process we go through before installing a water system in any given community to ensure that the community has the right profile to host a successful water system.
Some of the criteria that we look at are:
Objective Project Prospecting Criteria
-Poverty Level (to ensure we are staying true to our mission and serving in poor communities)
-Presence of Waterborne Disease
-Population Density (we need good population density for our water projects to be self-sustaining)
-Water Quality
-Water Quantity/Availability
-Competitive Environment
-Distance from Closest ADU project
-Other competitors
-Does the prospective partner own its property? (we make a substantial investment in infrastructure when we build a project and wouldn't want to have a landlord come in and take that investment.)
Subjective Project Prospecting Criteria:
-How does the church serve its community? (We want to make sure the church is already involved in outreach in its community and has a vision for serving not just its members but the community at large)
-Partnerships w/ other orgs (churches that are already working with other orgs and have a track record of success make good partners for us)
-What is the mission/vision of the church?
-Church Leadership
-# of years church has been in the community
-# of members of church
We look at all of these criteria through an intensive intial study process that includes interviews of the church leadership, a survey of at least 100 people in the community, interviewing a doctor in a local health clinic, taking water samples, and other ways to measure these criteria. Sebastian has been doing a great job with this process and so he and I were working together to document his process so that our other countries can use it to do a better job of selecting their church partners.
We spent most of the day Monday and Tuesday working through this including visits to a couple of communities we were prospecting, a conference call between all three country staffs to talk about the process. It was a very fulfilling time with Sebastian and the rest of the Mexico staff.
On Wednesday, the group started arriving for the United States for the Healing Waters Transformation Trip. These are trips that we run so people who are interested in Healing Waters and in mission trips can come to the country for a few days to learn more about us and the work we are doing here and engage in some authentic community service experiences. The group all arrived safely by Wednesday night and we enjoyed a delicious meal of tacos!
The group is a smaller one (4 people) but they all have incredible hearts for service and adventurous spirits. I know already that this is going to be an amazing "transformational" trip for all of us!
On Thursday we all got up early and headed to Coita, a town that is about 45 minutes outside of Tuxtla where we are staying. We started the day by visiting the Healing Waters system installed in Coita. We learned about the purification process for the water and were treated to fresh made limeade and sandwiches. Althea, (the communications coordinator and accountant for the Aguas de Unidad office here in Mexico) has arranged all of these activities for us and she is doing an amazing job helping to host the trip!
We loaded back into the van and drove about five minutes from the system to an orphanage. This orphanage receives free water donated from the Healing Waters system. We toured the facility and learned about all the different projects they are doing there. It is really an amazing place that takes kids from very young (3 years old) through 18. They have nice facilities and also a number of job skills training projects including a sewing area, a large agricultural project that included cultivation of corn, beans, peanuts as well as pigs and chickens. After we finished our tour we started working, painting one of the boys dorm facilities. We spent about three hours scraping, spackling, sanding and painting. Then we broke for lunch and enjoyed a delicious lunch with the kids.
After lunch half of our crew headed back to finish the painting project while the other half played games and did some activities with the kids in the orphanage including coloring, playing cards and making puppets to put together a puppet show.
It was an incredibly fulfilling day, exhausting but fulfilling. We piled back in to the van and headed back to Tuxtla to get cleaned up and go spend a night on the town. After getting cleaned up and relaxing a bit at our hotel, Althea picked us up with her family and we headed to "Marimba Park." Tuxtla (the capital city of the Chiapas state) is famous because there is a Marimba band that plays in a beautiful rotunda in this park every night, all year. Families come out to listen and dance in the park every night. It is a very festive environment and our group really go into it. They danced, and danced, and danced. Even I danced! Although it wasn't intentional. You see I was standing up on this raised area in the park watching the dancers and I saw a family trying to climb up onto the raised area. I went over to give them a hand up. After helping up the grandma and the middle-aged dad, I reached out my hand to help his middle-aged wife. She grabbed my hand, stepped up on the platform, wrapped her hand around my waist and started dancing with me. Her husband immediately pulled out his camera and started snapping photos, thoroughly enjoying watching his wife embarrass the goofy, klutzy gringo. Unfortunately a number of members of the group were nearby when this happened too, and they all began snapping photos as well. I am going to do everything I can to keep those photos from getting out, but we will see.
After that we went to dinner at an amazing restaurant that had traditional dishes from the Chiapas region. After dinner we had to stop for ice cream, clearly.
After that we went to dinner at an amazing restaurant that had traditional dishes from the Chiapas region. After dinner we had to stop for ice cream, clearly.
We finally made it back to our hotel at 11pm last night, exhausted and elated. It was an amazing day.
I am going to try to keep blogging, but others in the group are blogging too, so you can check out their perspectives and photos:
Shane Hoefer:
http://shanesthoughts.wordpress.com/
Jenni Salisbury:
http://travelerforgood.blogspot.com/
Take care, thanks for reading and LET THE CLEAN WATERS FLOW!
I am going to try to keep blogging, but others in the group are blogging too, so you can check out their perspectives and photos:
Shane Hoefer:
http://shanesthoughts.wordpress.com/
Jenni Salisbury:
http://travelerforgood.blogspot.com/
Take care, thanks for reading and LET THE CLEAN WATERS FLOW!
No comments:
Post a Comment