by Rich Aram | Kingsland Team Member | La Bolsa, Nicaragua

Thank you for your prayers. I wrote this Thursday but couldn’t send it until Friday.

One of our team said at the end of the workday on Wednesday something like, “we’re basically done, there’s really nothing left that can go wrong, right?.”

Not so! Thursday morning, we were measuring the water level in the well with a simple plumb line, a weight at the end of a long string. And the whole thing got dropped down inside of the well. Some may call that a Satanic attack on God’s work and some may call it butter-fingers. I don’t know. But we built a simple tool to go fishing down the well, again, prayed, and this one worked the first time. God tells us to pray for each other, so we thank you for praying for this trip.

We had brought some items for our friends: Frisbees, soccer balls, toothbrushes , toothpaste, Spanish Bibles. I had little time to shop due to other travel, but had to go to two different bookstores last Friday afternoon to find suitable Spanish Bibles. Kim and Liseth walked around house to house today to offer Bibles to our friends. Some of the little kids were happy to help carry them. That meant a lot to me. I resisted getting aggravated last week trying to get my shopping done, but here I saw the cute little kids helping to share those around their village. Wow. I went with and Liseth who translated as we offered them.

We cleaned the well again with compressed air, blasting out remaining sand and dirty water, for a few hours. And we rigged up the PVC pipe that would carry the water up the casing to the pump, rigged up the pump, and … it worked! They don’t have a dramatic flow rate but they don’t need a dramatic flow rate. They need clean, safe water and they got clean safe water.

Something like 5000 children die each day around the world from diseases from contaminated drinking water. One less group of kids has that risk now.

And there was a party in the village! The people dressed up a bit. One of the men shot off two home-made skyrockets. We brought two piñatas for the kids and they had a third one. One of ours was built to look like a water well pump, with a goofy face on it. The kids loved the piñatas. One of the little girls danced to the background music and timed her swings with the music. I wonder if she will be a dancer or musician when she grows up. One of the boys took a mighty swing and lost the stick: it was almost as big as a baseball bat. Luckily he didn’t hit anyone. The kid that learned to juggle is even more amazing with a soccer ball. I wonder if he will play grow up to play on the national team, that is if he can get used to playing with shoes on.

They cooked us chicken soup. We saw the two chickens live, tied up in a basket, just yesterday.

Kim and Liseth taught them how to use the pump. One of the recommendations is to keep their livestock away (even build a fence), so they had made dog, cow and chicken faces on paper plates and had us act that out. Good old Leo acted out the pump, while another of the Living Water girls acted out how to pump and how not to pump. He held a water bottle in one hand and poured that into a bucket when she did it right. Everyone laughed but maybe they learned too.

We cleaned up the site, shared handshakes and hugs, and rode off into the sunset. Well, it was still early afternoon.

Thank you for your prayer support. You helped to make that happen.

We spent about an hour wandering around the Masaya market. I’m pretty sure that’s where nephew Nathan took Randy, Shari and me two years ago. We went to church with Jorge tonight. He warned us not to sit near the loudspeakers because the music tends to be a bit loud. Yes it was. And it was all in Spanish, oddly enough. Most of the tunes were familiar, but once they started singing in Spanish, it was hard for me to remember the English words. And there was Leo again, playing electric bass dressed up with a necktie. I remember him lying flat in the mud for most of Tuesday, up to his shoulder in drilling mud, to keep the suction line clear of rock cuttings. I am impressed with the people here.

The Living Water house or compound is surrounded by a high wall with barbed wire. A professional guard mans the gate 24 hours a day. When he opened it last night to let us in after church, he had a loaded double barrel shotgun in his hand just in case. So it’s still a tough world here too. I hoped to send some video but my email is behaving badly and the wireless here went out tonight. We had a lot of lightning and heavy rain and that probably did it.

We play tourist tomorrow morning and chose a zip line course on volcano Mumbacho. Shari, Randy and I did the same course with Nathan two years ago and it was great. I will hook up with Nathan and family Friday afternoon and spend the weekend with them.

Thank you for your prayers.

God is good.
Rich