New Well at Hospital

We have now installed a new hand dug well on the hospital grounds to help with the water shortage during the hot season. We had been running out of water for both the construction site and the hospital building itself. We have one deep well right now that serves the existing water tower and we would like to take this well and add another water tower and a wind mill for pumping the well. We usually have wind here at the hospital since we are completely open to the south and west. Bob and I have been brainstorming trying to come up with a wind mill that we could make from things that we can find here. If we use things from here, then when the hospital gets turned over to the nationals, they can repair it with parts from here if they understand the mechanicals. The well cost us about $25 a meter and we went down about 17 meters. We sit right on top of a big aquifer so the water is not that far down. The problem is that our property sits next to three of the city's wells so our water table is unstable depending on how much the city is drawing for their towers. The picture was taken when we hit water. We had it dug another meter down after we hit water. It will be a real blessing once we get it up and running the way we want. Click on the picture and you will get a close-up view.
Be in prayer for the hospital as we go through some growing pains. We want everyone to be on the same page as we go forward for Christ's sake. Pray that His name will be glorified.

Internet down

It is amazing how tied we are to our internet and computers. We have been down for about a week and I feel disconnected from the world. I don't get any world news here that I can understand. I really need to learn more French.
The Hospital building is coming along nicely. We have all the main trusses up and are starting on the stringers between the trusses for attaching the roofing material. All the trusses and stingers are designed and built here on the grounds of the hospital. We buy the different sizes of angle iron and cut them to length then weld together. We kind of have a little assembly line going with trusses. We keep Roger, the one handed painter, busy with all the metal work. Next week we have a team from Zepher Hills Florida coming to help install the metal roof on pod one. We are looking forward to them coming and getting a lot accomplished. I really enjoy spending time with teams and getting to know their stories of how God has brought them to Africa and what he is doing in their lives.
We had a little girl come into the hospital last week bitten by some kind of cobra as I understand it. The parents brought her in 5 days after the bite occured and she was in bad condition. The mentallity of the people here is that you bring a person into the hospital to die, not to get better, so we usually don't get the people here that have just come down with something but rather are almost dead. Thanks to God, the girl is still alive and is recovering. From what I understand, not many people have lived through the bite of this type of cobra, but our God heals. Pray that the family comes to know Christ through this.
Pray for this next week as I will be very busy with the work team and that we will be safe.

Burkina Faso

This last weekend we took a little vacation to Burkina Faso and did some hiking, swimming, and wildlife watching. The trip took us a little over 4 hours to get there by the time we filled out our visas and all the other things we had to do at the boarder. Burkina is one country south of us in Mali. They are a little farther from the desert so it was quite a bit greener than it is in Koutiala. We were just tagalongs with Barry, Terri, Ben, and Jake. One of the first things we did was go shopping for the items that are not available to us here in Koutiala which are things like cheese, hamburger, and just the normal kinds of things you would buy in a grocery store. Then again, we don't have grocery stores here in Koutiala. We even got to eat out at a great Korean restaurant owned by a christian Korean woman. We topped it off with ice cream from the Dany Ice Cream store. For our day trips, we went to some water falls that had little pools of water that we could lounge and relax in not to mention cool off in, and the next day to see some hippos in the wild. The day we went to the falls, it started to turn dark and storm while we were up there. We had a little hike to get down from the falls and we were high tailing it down. We no sooner got down and into the trucks and it cut loose. We made it back safe and sound.
The next trip was to go and see the hippos. It was about an hours drive from the CMA guest house to the lake out side of Bobo. We rode in an aluminum boat that three natives using poles to push us along navigated us to the spot where saw the hippos. Jeffrey counted 48 hippos. We got within 50 to 60 yards of one group of hippos. A few of them were not happy that we were there, but we kept our distance. This place that we went said that in the hot season there are elephants there at the lake to stay cool. We will hopefully get to check that out also.
The hospital building is coming along nicely. We have all the main trusses up and are staring on making the stringers between them. By the middle of July, we should be installing the roof.
Thanks again for all your prayers.