If you saw haven't seen our post from earlier this week detailing the steps taken to complete the well project in Kalo village, skim through it before you read on. If you have, you know it was a nearly 2 1/2 year process with some serious setbacks and obstacles. But now, we have thousands of people with access to water, made clean by God's amazing purification system. We celebrate the powerful impact this development is poised to make on Kalo and the surrounding villages. We've forged key relationships with the 'Kebele' or village leadership and our development partners. We've learned significant lessons through the twists and turns. Not all well projects in Africa are as complex and we are anticipating our next set of projects will be less costly and take less time. But as the author of Lamentations says, 'It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth'.
Good for a wannabe non-profit international development organization too.
As we celebrate, we lament some of things the process revealed. For rural Arsi Oromo people, there is a besetting hopelessness hidden behind the smiles and giddiness they show whenever we visit. Some of this is rooted in the helplessness they feel to change their own situation. We experienced this first hand as we sat across the table from the local electrical utility manager and he said there was nothing he could do to accelerate the repair to the transformer that was blown two months earlier. But the feeling comes from inside too, evident by the refrain of "money, money" from the kids who chase our vans and hold our hands as we walk through the marketplace. Its the only English word they seem to know. These are things clean water isn't going to change. Like lightning to an inadequate transformer, the dependence and despair we've seen in our Ethiopian friends has shorted our vision, and driven us to something with greater capacity to inspire transformation. Our partners already know this and they've been patiently enlightening us. And, praise God, we've begun to work together on initiatives and strategies that lead the Arsi to a better future beyond access to clean water. Because water alone is not enough.
Good for a wannabe non-profit international development organization too.As we celebrate, we lament some of things the process revealed. For rural Arsi Oromo people, there is a besetting hopelessness hidden behind the smiles and giddiness they show whenever we visit. Some of this is rooted in the helplessness they feel to change their own situation. We experienced this first hand as we sat across the table from the local electrical utility manager and he said there was nothing he could do to accelerate the repair to the transformer that was blown two months earlier. But the feeling comes from inside too, evident by the refrain of "money, money" from the kids who chase our vans and hold our hands as we walk through the marketplace. Its the only English word they seem to know. These are things clean water isn't going to change. Like lightning to an inadequate transformer, the dependence and despair we've seen in our Ethiopian friends has shorted our vision, and driven us to something with greater capacity to inspire transformation. Our partners already know this and they've been patiently enlightening us. And, praise God, we've begun to work together on initiatives and strategies that lead the Arsi to a better future beyond access to clean water. Because water alone is not enough.
