Get Some!!!!!

by Elsa and Jamie
Wednesday, July 1
After a decent night’s rest, among the cool weather, we began day two. During devotions Jon expressed his expectations of this short-term mission’s trip and how God’s creation fits together so perfectly. He is excited about working with the men of Santa Maria de Jesus in constructing a cistern – “getting down and dirty with his fellow man,” as he puts it.

Lito, a hard-working, compassionate local missionary, led half of our group to where the cistern would be built, while the other half stayed at the girl’s school and painted. A cistern is a storage container to harvest rain water when water supply is scarce. This will be Lito’s 75th time constructing a cistern. Sadly, the government only turns on the water for an hour every two days. For these reasons, the need for these containers is great! Currently, there are 25 families on a waiting list to have these cisterns built in the yards of their homes. Each cistern cost 1500 Quetzales, equivalent to $186 U.S. dollars. Lito’s heart is for helping the people, therefore, he only charges for supplies and not for the labor.
Constructing a cistern is hard, physical labor. With our servant hearts, we graciously put our gloves on and got to work. Yeah, sounds easy but after six hours of work, and a short lunch break to munch on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, our bodies experienced an average day for Lito. First step was to loosen up the soil where the container would be placed nine feet deep with a circumference of six feet. Unfortunately, Houston, we have a problem! A hefty layer of cement attempted to discourage us and wear us down but we applied Philippians 4:13 to our day’s work…”We can do all things through Christ who strengthens us.”
Shoveling after shoveling, our backs began to ache, sweat dripped down from our foreheads but we all pressed on. Our words of encouragement to one another were “Get some.” Don’t ask…it helped us through the day. We accomplished digging a hole of three feet deep along with the “ring of protection.” Cement was mixed by hand and bricks were laid precisely to create this ring of protection. All the dirt that was removed from the hole had to be transported about three miles from the work site. After several trips of transporting the dirt, we finished a great day of work by walking back to the school in the rain.


Sorry for the delay... internet was not working! mj