Last year students (6-12th grade) raised money for water wells for Africa. We raised over $800,000 as a state. This was because in villages where there is no clean water women need to travel every day, sometimes for miles to just get water that is not clean to drink. The water is where animals drink from and if an animal dies or uses it as a bathroom it still gets used by the local people there. The roads are sometimes not safe to walk on to get water. People get attacked or robbed of what little money they have. I did not know what the impact of what it meant until I got there.
Since the locals did not have to travel to get water here is what we could do that if they needed to travel to get water would not have happened.
Over these last two months I got to see the impact of what clean water can do for a village. Every day we would go out to the village and preach on Jesus and what he did for them. We got to see several 100, might have even been over 1000 people who came to Christ. We got to see healing and demons cast out of people. We preached in the local churches there and even planted a new church that is thriving in the village where we went the first week.
I also saw strong healthy animals all over the village. There were chickens everywhere with many little chicks following mother around the town pecking at the ground. I saw a pig with over 10 piglets all trying to get milk from mom. Goats were also wondering around the villages. I even saw a few donkeys pulling carts around will piles of wood to sell in the market. I saw a dozen cows walking down the street and I saw around 50 of them grazing in a field. Without clean water these animals would not have been big and strong.
I also saw many small shops all over the villages. People would go to the city and buy things from the store and then break them into smaller portions and sell them for profit. Things like drinks they would mark them up by about 10 cents. People would also sell chicken on the side of the street that was cooked and cut into smaller sections, I had it several times and they were so good. A popular thing they sold were chips (French fries) and they were good and were very cheap. I also saw a lot of sugar cane, it was tall and thick and it was so good. It is also very cheap so the kids were always eating it.
The biggest thing that clean water meant for us was that it opened the door for the Word of God to be shared. There were many women and children and the events that we did around the villages. Since they were not getting water we could share with them the hope we have in Christ. There were not many young men at the events. Beer is a big problem here for the men in Malawi, they drink a lot of it. As we neared the end of our month in Malawi , young men showed up. In Zambia there is growth happening in the students they are hungry for the Word of God.God is moving in the young men here and something was started by my team going to the villages where God was not known.
There is something about giving to a project and then seeing what it really means for the villages that we spend time in. I was amazed at what clean water does to villages where clean water does not exist. I will never look at water the same way again.
