Intern Update: Still drilling in Ixiamas
July 28th, 2010Plans had been made to provide the community of Santa Fe with a well, and on a Monday the community leaders gave us the word to come. On Tuesday, after a fifteen minute ride from the Internado, we were dropped off in Santa Fe with the materials. We arrived to find only two workers, but in the afternoon more workers showed up. For the next three days with enough laborers, we drilled 30 meters. During much of this time, I was making the outer filter with two inch pipe, plastic tarp, contact cement and a saw. We installed the filter and pipe, filled sand in around it, and began pumping water to clean out the well.
Working in Santa Fe was much easier than working in Puerto Russo because it is so close to Ixiamas. Bolivar and I have been able to sleep in comfort at home in the Internado and either be driven to the site by car or take the 40-minute walk. The week ended with only the pumping mechanism left to be installed.
Sunday (July 11) a mission team from Trinity UMC in Birmingham arrived. The men with the group had come to help us with well drilling.
Intern Update: Meet Troy
June 28th, 2010
After a long sleepless overnight flight to La Paz and bumbling through customs and baggage claim, I was given a warm welcome to Bolivia from Angel. He showed me the city of La Paz as I tried to acclimate to the altitude and new culture. At noon I met Mateo at the airport and took the flight to Rurre. I was excited to see the jungle and be in the warmer climate. I met Rachel, her parents and Olivia, and the following morning, we were in a minivan on the bumpy road to Ixiamas. (Picture at left is the river in Puerto Ruso, the community’s main water source)
My work in Bolivia for the two months I am here is to install wells in communities that need a clean water source. Bolivar taught me about the process of digging the well and how the pump works. My first week here we made parts of the pump from pvc pipe, leather and flipflop sandles. My training would be put into practice when members of the Puerto Russo, a jungle community, came to talk about installing a well next to their school. (Picture at right is the school in Puerto Ruso)
The process of digging the well was hard work. The drill is picked up and dropped repeatedly by a team hauling on the rope it is attached to. Water brings the dirt up from the drill and through the pipe. After three days the drilling was complete. Bolivar and I came back to Ixiamas, and tomorrow we will go back to finish installing the well.(Picture at left is Troy and Bolivar demonstrating how to dig the well)
Learn & Serve 2010: Week Three
June 24th, 2010June 13 - 18, 2010 was an absolute BLAST!!! We loved having so many groups from so many different walks of life on our campus learning and growing every day. Last week, we hosted three churches from Alabama, one church from Georgia, one church from Mississippi, and one church from Illinois for a total of 69 participants!
All participants were stretched and taught in various ways throughout their week at Learn & Serve. Raphael Ogbole helped to teach many of the young men and women how to make mud bricks during their visit at SIFAT. These bricks will be used to help build a Nigerian house that will be added to our Global Village. The bricks will also be used to construct fuel efficient cook stoves to help reduce smoke inhalation among women and children in developing countries.
During the L&S week, Vicky Planta also taught workshops on edible insects. SIFAT held a conference this spring that discussed edible insects and the benefit of using them in daily diets to obtain protein and nutrients. The youth had a wonderful opportunity to learn about these edible insects during their stay at SIFAT!
Every Thursday, we take youth groups that have come SIFAT to learn about missions and what it looks like to bear fruit in their daily lives, and ask them to serve in our local community. We send these groups to different projects, giving the youth and adults an opportunity to give back what they have been learning about all week with their counselors. Some of our projects include visiting our local nursing home, lending a hand at another non-profit organization, and helping keep our streets looking nice with the city street department. We have seen that students enjoy sharing God’s love in a very practical, tangible way while they serve in these areas around SIFAT!
Keep checking out SIFAT’s Facebook page for updates on pictures. If you are interested in more information about Learn & Serve, please visit our website at www.sifat.org/learnandserve or call our office at 256.396.2015.
Tell us about your SIFAT experience!
June 23rd, 2010Short-term mission teams, our international field study training participants and Learn & Serve youth groups have been coming and going since May. Wow! There are so many different perspectives and experiences to share, but SIFAT needs your help.
Did you go on a life-changing trip to Bolivia, Ecuador or Zambia? Are you a student, chaperon or youth leader who spent a day and night in our Global Village and served in our local community? Or, maybe as a university student or Haitian community leader you learned simple, appropriate technologies that can save lives and meet basic human needs. If so, we would love to hear your story.
Submissions for the SIFAT Journal or SIFAT blog may be made by emailing your story (with a photo!) to Marie, lanierm@sifat.org. For possible inclusion in the Summer 2010 issue of the Journal, please send your article in no later than July 2, 2010.
Intern Update: Shortages
June 17th, 2010Our current intern in Ixiamas, Bolivia, is 2008 Practicum graduate Becky Forrest. Becky served on short-term mission trips in 2007 and 2008 in Ixiamas. She is now in her second year as an intern.
The joys of having power on a regular basis after the blockade opened up and the arrival of fuel was short lived. One of the generators went out of service, and we now hove power on a day and off a day. We are not sure how long this will take or even if they plan on repairing the generator because we have power headed this way from the big hydro plant near LaPaz, which we have been told will be here before the end of the year. This also brings water shortage because we are not able to pump water up to our holding tank. In the United States, we take so many things for granted.
Winter is almost here with the cool south winds. I never realized how cold 65 to 70 feels when you are accustomed to the 90’s, and suddenly you have 15 to 20 mph winds and then the temperature drops 20 degrees. Two walls of my room are screened windows, so I close the curtains, duct tape them to the wall to keep the wind out, and pull out my wool blanket and fleece. In a few days, it will be 90 again. You can imagine how good that cold shower feels good on those days! That is winter in Ixiamas.
Learn & Serve 2010: Week One
June 7th, 2010Our first week of Learn & Serve was absolutely incredible! We had 102 participants from 5 different churches from the states of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi.
The youth and adults enjoyed spending their time worshiping in the Quonset Hut, meeting new people in their SPEAR groups, being rained out of the Global Village…twice!, playing fun games on the soccer field and many, many other things!!
Learn & Serve 2010: Meet Your Counselors!
May 28th, 2010We are SO excited to introduce to you….
YOUR Learn & Serve Counselors for summer 2010!!!
(From top to bottom, left to right - Hillary, Hamp, Taylor, Leah, Leigh, Lauren, Bryan, Carter)
All eight of the counselors arrived at SIFAT last weekend and have been spending their entire week preparing for an INCREDIBLE summer. This is such a special group of people who are all blessed with wonderful personalities, gifted with special talents, and are super pumped about hanging out with youth this summer!
Three of our counselors (Carter, Hillary, and Taylor) have been campers at SIFAT, and are now apart of our summer staff. What a wonderful example of the fruit and the growth of our Learn & Serve summer camp over the past few years!
This year, the L & S theme is “Fruit”. Each of the counselors will be leading youth of all different ages and from all different states, including: Alabama, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, and even Illinois.
The counselors will be asking these youth, “Where is the fruit in our lives?”, and they will help lead a discussion of the process that it takes to produce fruit that brings glory to God.
CARES 2010: Spring Season
May 25th, 2010The CARES (Creative Academic Resources for Educational Success) Program is a practical way for students young and old to experience and learn about Asian, African, and Latin American countries and cultures through hands-on activities.
This spring was a wonderful time to host our CARES Around the World programs! We hosted 737 participants over a span of 7 events throughout March, April, and May. We had a variety of ages ranging from 2nd graders to seniors in high school. The CARES volunteers and staff enjoyed having 9 public school groups, 3 home school groups, and 3 church groups experience our program in the SIFAT Global Village.
All of our participants were exposed to Asian, African and Latin American countries while experiencing different traditions, languages and cultures of each of these places. Students this spring learned how to make an adobe brick, tasted a handmade corn tortilla, and crossed over our Andean rope bridge.
Many of the groups that we hosted at SIFAT this spring were able to experience the Hunger Banquet that we offer during lunch on the day of their field trip. This “banquet” gives the students and chaperons an opportunity to view world hunger in a very different way. This serves as a great lesson for students and chaperons alike to better understand the hunger that majority of our world lives with every day.
This was a wonderful spring of CARES events, full of learning and lots of fun! We are definitely looking forward to the events that are set for Fall Season 2010! Dates for this fall are listed on our website at www.sifat.org/cares. If you are interested in registering for this experience, please email cares@sifat.org for further information!
Zambia: A building begins
May 24th, 2010
I’ve always been impressed with the impact SIFAT’s short-term mission projects have on the people with whom I travel. When I make comparisons with other mission trips I’ve been on, SIFAT participants learn more, they have a better experience, and they often get turned onto missions both at home and internationally.
I’ve had the opportunity to shadow Tom and Peggy the last couple of days to see what goes into laying the groundwork for a successful mission trip. There’s a lot of work that mission teams never see! It’s like putting together a puzzle, fitting resources together with people and organizations to make a big picture. Only in this case, the puzzle pieces keep changing shape, and you don’t really know what the final picture will look like. You simply have to trust that God’s got the picture on the front of the box, and when it all goes together, it will be better than we imagine.
When you put together any puzzle, it helps to get the corners and sides done first. EWB and Harbert Construction, the local churches and SIFAT have done marvelous work in putting together the first pieces. The past few days we’ve done some networking with WorldVision, Zambikes and other local potential partners. One of the engineering students told me that he was surprised at how much of the work involves diplomacy and learning how to navigate both local culture and our own.
I’m only here for a short time. I already can’t wait to come back.
See Tom’s photos after the jump! Read the rest of this entry »
STM Update: Auburn UMC in Quesimpuco, Bolivia
May 18th, 2010Auburn UMC sent a team of college students, vets, medical professionals and others to Quesimpuco, Bolivia, from May 14-24. Because the project is in such a remote location high in the Andes Mountains, internet access is unavailable. Team leader Scott Middleton has been contacting his wife Lindsey, who is sending us updates, via satellite phone.
I am happy (and relieved) to report that the team made it safely to Quesimpuco about an hour ago. No car troubles, no one got sick, and they made the trip in 10 hours and 45 minutes – in other words, they’ve had a really good day! They have already unloaded and are now getting settled in for the night. They will attend church in the village in the morning, enjoy the official village “greeting” and then get set up for the week. There will be no call-in to the AUMC services tomorrow – they will do that next week from La Paz (where the Bishop of the United Methodist Church there apparently is planning a dinner for the team!). They will also have a visit this week from John Funk, a missionary in Bolivia with the Board of Global Ministries of the UMC.
I think we’ll all sleep better tonight, knowing they all are safe and sound — and that each team member is exactly where God has placed him or her. They probably won’t check in for another day or two, so I’ll send another update then.
If anyone would like a visual of Quesimpuco as you pray for the team, Scott found this image on Google earth – it is a few years old and predates the bridge site, but it’s an amazing illustration of how far this team has gone to be the hands and feet of Christ: click here.
May 17 Update
Yesterday, the team enjoyed the village greeting, which was apparently interrupted by rain (unusual for this time of year), and then went to church. They set up the clinic for today, and then went back down to the village for evening worship. Scott said the weather is windy and cold, and it took 3 or 4 calls before the satellite phone could get through. He called about 8:30 our time (they’re an hour ahead of us) and said that everyone else had already gone to bed.
In other news, the Bolivian government is preparing to build a hospital and new elementary school in Quesimpuco and will apparently be tearing down the Catholic church to do so. For those of you who have been before (or who have, like me, just seen lots of pictures) this will include tearing down the bell tower, which is probably the biggest landmark there. This will leave the Methodist church as the only house of worship in the village. The missionary delegation (not sure who that entails besides John Funk and his wife) will arrive tomorrow and stay for a few days, and they will have Market Day on Wednesday.
I think that covers all my notes! It sounds as if everyone is in good shape and they have all earned a good night’s rest. Scott said he will check in again, probably on Wednesday. I know we will all continue to lift up the team in prayer!