Sorry no pictures on this post. Computer, camera, and memory card problems. I’ll post pictures as soon as I get all my hardware problems solved. Seems like a never ending battle.
We had a good month in the village. Two weeks can easily turn into four once the rains start coming. This is the rice planting season. Or the season for any sort of planting. Farmers in the mountains rely fully on the rain for their crops.
For those of you who follow this blog will remember that we had a water project proposed. Well that project has been funded and completed. We ran two Kilometers of water pipe to two different places. This project seems to be a building block for many new relationships. They see us running water pipe and then all of sudden you have many new friends. I’m not concerned about their motives. It’s the relationship that I care about. This water will be used to ensure the survival of our new 3,500 coffee plants. Others in the family and church who will be planting coffee or that will be working with us will also be using the water.
Once the rains started coming we began planting our coffee, avocado and banana trees. We now have over three thousand coffee trees, 100 avocado trees, various different shad tress and a few hundred banana trees. The shade trees, avocado and banana trees will serve as a shad canopy for the coffee. We already began micro loaning seedlings out to other farmers and have sparked the interest of many other local farmers who say they want to plant coffee with us next year. Which is our goal. We want farmers to invest long term investments into their properties. A good veriety of different cash crops that they can get a little something from every season. Now they just battle with the supply and demand of tomatoes and chillies. Most of the time just wasting their time and money in hoping to get rich once the supply drops and the demand increases.
Our house is pretty much done. I still need to finish framing in the kitchen area but have run out of wood. I used the rest of the lumber on the bathroom. Again I will send some pictures once I can.
We also had a lot of time to spend with people in the church and were sharing and teaching. Our main theme seemed to be relationship. To have a relationship with God. Something that isn’t taught here. Many people in the church didn’t seem to understand when we explained that that’s what it means to be a Christian. To have a living relationship with Jesus. He is your father and friend. You can talk with him and he listens. My 15 year old nephew came to me after church one day and said “Thank you.” He has never heard anything like this. He said that is was cool to know that we could be friends with God. It seems that we are mainly just battling with the spirit of religion all the time. Living in this contractual world makes having a grace filled relationship with the living God seem impossible. But we are seeing people accept what we say. Even if it’s just my nephew being able to grasp it. That makes it all worth while.