Lastic Canyon Update #3 02-12-13
We have a small fairly flat work area where we can turn a gravel truck around. In one corner is our container used for secure storage. In another corner is a tent we have erected for our foreman/night watchman, Leesyan. Nearby is the fire pit where the cook and her helper toil daily producing the noon meal for our entire labor force. Alongside the container a local entrepreneur has set up a little kitchen, and prepares little deep fried treats for sale to the workers. Across the turnaround area another enterprising soul or two have their little selection of goods arrayed on the ground, hoping for a sale to the cash rich workers. In a canyon with a barter economy, we are now paying about 130 workers cash wages of nearly $3000 a week, an amount I’d guess was only seen on an annual basis before.
The footwear of choice for the men seems to be big black rubber boots, especially those that are obviously oversized. Most of the men are sporting a new pair, we see other “new to them” clothes (the majority of the people in Haiti wear used clothing imported in bales from the US). A couple of days ago, our cook and her helper both showed up for work in new dresses! As in brand new, sewed especially for them, new dresses! The cook’s is a pleasant bright purple, and her helper’s was a tiny floral print. To the best of anybody’s knowledge, the cook has worn the same dress each and every day since we started four years ago. After one day of purple, we’re now back to the old one.
And the children! We have about 75 women on the payroll, and a large number of them have families. I would guess that most of their children from about 8 years old and down are also in the camp area, with the older ones sitting and holding those from about the age of three down to several that are only weeks old. They sit in ragged rows around the site with wide open eyes, and watch everything we do. They are remarkably well behaved, and seem to have endless patience. When it’s feeding time, the mother will break away from the rock haul, come take care of business, and be back to work in short order. Our daughter Kellie spends hours in that pack, playing with the infants, teaching English and learning Creole with the little kids, and doing a cross cultural immersion.
Many of these children are clearly suffering from malnourishment, many are actually sick because of the “hunger time” going on since the crops were destroyed by the hurricanes, and it very likely that what we have mistaken for patience is actually a lack of energy to run and play, or otherwise act like a normal kid. Our workers have supplied some of the ones without clothes with some small garments. If you want to see some proud little boy, imagine giving a four year old his first pair of pants, and watch him strut around and show them off to the entire world!
Every day we have an opening and closing ceremony as each worker turns in his time card, gets his shovel, wheelbarrow, or whatever tool he will use for the day, and is assigned to a crew with a specific task. In the evening the process is reversed, the tools are handed in, and every worker that is expected to return is given his employee card back again, which they guard very jealously. One day last week some of our crew observed the children playing “work”. They had little bits of paper, each one came up and handed them in, where given a stick “tool”, and then started carrying rocks around. Over on the side the little girls were busy playing cook. I didn’t see it, but they reported it was as much fun as a circus.
And speaking of the cook, I must tell you about the employee cafeteria. It is Haitian custom that an employer is responsible to feed his workers while they are on duty. In an urban environment this would usually mean that each worker would get a daily meal stipend in addition to their regular wage, and they could go out at lunch time and buy a meal. Since the noon meal is their big meal of the day, and there is obviously no other place nearby were even a small group could get lunch, we have hired the above mentioned cook and provided the tools and raw materials for her to work with.
If you take three rocks about the size of a pint jar and lay them in a triangle with about a 4” gap in between, a round bottomed 3 gallon pot called a “chodye” will sit comfortably on top of them. A small fire can be lighted with sticks poked in from all three ways, and the fire can be easily controlled by adjusting the sticks in and out to make a larger or smaller flame. Another pot for the meat or onion sauce can be added by placing another two rocks nearby and the next pot resting on them and leaning against the main rice pot. A small amount of the fire can be transferred, and now there are a couple more holes to feed the sticks in.
The menu doesn’t vary much. The base is rice in large quantities, with a small amount of beans or lentils mixed in. She also prepares a meat sauce from the canned chicken we buy for her, and a small amount of that is poured over the top for flavoring, and usually a few rings of raw onion laid over the top. Back at the start of the project we were advised to provide one chicken for every twenty workers twice a week. Don’t think of a plump 4 lb barn raised broiler with some fat; think a skinny 1.5 lb bantam that has never been feed anything in its life, and has been chased daily by dogs in hope of a meal, and you can see what even a little bit of canned chicken can do on a daily basis. Because of our larger than normal work force, she is cooking about 1 ½ 25KG bags of rice per day! That’s about 83 lb of rice per day, cooked to perfection over a fire in three large chodyes!
We also have a repair dept. Since we have tools and a welder on site, the locals bring little broken things to be fixed, and they have huge faith in our ability to take a pile of scarps and make it right again.
And then there is the sick ward. We’ve had two workers injured by dropping the rocks they were carrying, one on the hand and one on the foot. These are our first two “lost time accidents” in our hired crew in the four years we’ve been working. We take them down to the clinic in Fond Parisien about once a week to be seen by a nurse, but the rest of the time I change their dressings in the canyon every second day. While we are working at that it is not unusual for somebody else to show me a wound, an ulcerated sore, or some other problem caused by daily life in a Haitian canyon, and we do what we can with them.
Two weeks ago a girl of about 14 came walking out of the mountains and asked for help. Per her story, about three days earlier when gathering firewood, a branch she was trying to break off whiplashed and ripped her top lip off from one side to the other. It was hanging down the side of her mouth, and splinters of the wood were still embedded in it. My son Jalen ran her down the mountain in the Ranger to look for help. The first clinic they went to refused to stitch it because the wound was several days old, but the second place they tried agreed to help. They did a good job of cleaning it up and stitching it back together, and provided them with additional dressings and both pain pills and antibiotics. Every several days she came back out to our site to have her dressings changed, and finally a few days ago we took her back to the clinic for another doctor visit, and to have the stiches removed. She lives about a five hour walk across the mountains, so it’s unlikely we’ll see her again, but the repair to her face, and the chance for her to live a productive life instead of being a hideous outcast, made it a very rewarding experience.
Meanwhile, back on the ranch . . .
We have been doing a small amount of work amid the daily life that swirls around us. Last update we had just laid the base course of the new dam. That work progressed steadily, and the final of about 225 yards was placed on the 9th of February, well run through with six tons of steel. We then moved on to building a splash pad for the spill pipes, and to bank reinforcement, with an eye toward future erosion prevention. The one storm caused breach to the canal wall has been rebuilt. We breached the wall in one place to allow us to wheel barrow gravel and supplies through. Now that our dam concrete has been poured, that one should be repaired shortly. We’ve added some thrust blocking, and the fountain in the Village of Le Roche has been rebuilt higher up the bank in an area that’s somewhat protected by trees, which will hopefully protect it from future erosion pressure.
Next up will be a mix of repairs and strengthening projects. We are modifying the control gate locations for what we believe will be easier and better control of the water. We have also added significant protection the mouth of the canal so we can prevent the big storm driven rocks from entering, and have planned for a steel gate that can be dropped down to completely close off the canal. The materials for this gate are in the container, and we’ll start its construction as soon as we can get the goods through customs.
The nine km long pipeline that connects to the dam/canal/headworks we have built follows the riverbed most of its journey to the farming valley. We did one repair last summer to a spot exposed by a storm, and Hurricane Sandy exposed it in two more spots, which we will be encasing in concrete. With the huge amount of overburden removed from the riverbed by Hurricane Sandy, by my estimate as much as 250,000 yards per running mile, this might be a recurring problem. It is possible that someday the upper section will need to be re-laid or exposed and encased in place, but that’s another day . . .
Our group of volunteers has been working hard and enjoying the project as well. Today the house has 17 in residence – Jalen left this morning and Carlin arrived this afternoon. He was the last one scheduled in, and most of us here now have one way tickets, so we’ll finish the project and make our way home. There has been a little GI disruption, and almost every day somebody stays home from the canyon to be nearer to the “facilities”. That combined with the usual insect bites, unexplained rashes, an a large swelling on the leg of yours truly the size of half a grapefruit keeps it all interesting.
While all of this has been going on, we’ve also been working with the Water Committee trying to move the administration along. In a meeting about 10 days ago we made some real headway on the budget and administration. We have rented an office, and hired a full time administrator for the proudly named “Pwoje Iragasion de Lastic/Fond Parisien”. He will have a full time assistant with some office duties and some field oversight. Next in line is the chief Sentinel (ditch tender) with his five assistants, and we’ve even got a janitor on staff for an hour a day! Up in the canyon our foreman and the Village of Lastic Chief is a man named Leesyan. He and his son have been hired for security of the dam and canal, and will be responsible for the operation of the gates, keeping the grates and sand traps clean, and minimizing “dezod”, or mischief. The entire operation, including 11 employees from administrator down to the janitor, office rent and supplies, transportation, the ever present miscellaneous account, and a monthly stipend for the three man Board of Directors, will be covered by our annual operating budget of $15,300 USD. In addition, we will be collecting about $15,000 USD for the capital improvements fund. As the funds in that account grow, we will start making improvements to the system, and possibly expand the system to additional farm ground that we cannot currently reach.
There is a farmer group in the area called the “Planters Group”. These men had thought that if the water ever came they would be in charge of it. When we held community meetings last year, and discussed the system upgrades and repairs that were to be done over the summer, they also expected to be in charge of the funds. As many have learned in this and similar cultures, such funds have a strange way of diminishing, and seldom last until the end of the project. After the attenders at last summer’s meeting approved the repairs, we went ahead and got them done. This effort was spearheaded by our animator Fre Bob, Sam Willhite, and our local minister Fre Brutus. We have completed some very necessary upgrades and storm damage repairs, and we completed it only 3% over the approved budget. This amount is a loan to the irrigation project, and will be the first thing to be repaid from the capital improvements fund. Our brother Brutus has agreed to be the treasurer for the district, since he has the respect and trust of the entire community.
After we had heard some rumblings in the community that the Planters Group was accusing us and the various locals involved of doing a power grab for the water, and other unpleasantries, we invited their leadership to a meeting at the district office. It was well attended by about 20 of them, including the three main agitators. In it we laid out our budget, plans for administering the water, the key employees, the maps, and every component that we could. There were some heated discussions, but when they heard that the repairs had been completed so close to budget, and when they heard the final amount that will be charged for the water, they started to listen much closer to what we had to say. We parted on good terms, with handshakes all around. Apparently they have had several meetings themselves since then to discuss the whole project, and today their leader came to the office and told our administrator that they had decided “to walk with us”. Their members have been advised to pay their water fees as soon as possible, and to be on board and support the canal workers. This is a huge answer to prayer, because a number of the group are influential community members, and to work without their continuing support would be very difficult.
There are a number of conversion factors involved, and translation of the costs will be a little difficult. Most business transaction here are handled with a monetary sum called a Haitian Dollar (HD), which does not exist in fact. They use a land measurement system called a Kawo, and often speak of a quarter of that as a Ka. All that being said, we will charge 275HD per Ka for annual access to all the needed water, which equates to roughly $41 US/acre. For a comparison, a few days ago I spoke with a local grower whose land is outside the district. He can get water from a well that is run by another aid group. He purchases as much fuel as he can afford, delivers it to the group, who pours the fuel into the tank of the diesel pump engine. They start the engine, and the water is his until the pump runs out of fuel. This costs him about 220HD per Ka for ONE IRRIGATION. When he found out what we would charge only a little more for a year’s water, he said “It is a gift! It is a gift!”.
A number of the locals had enough faith to plant their crops on schedule even though the system was not in operation. Those bean crops are just now coming into bloom, and are getting pretty dry. We were all prepared to run a little water into a clean out on the pipe so that the beans could be watered, and then both Saturday and Sunday nights we had good rains. This could herald an early end to the dry season, but since we are about completed in the canyon, I don’t think it will hinder our work.
There are interesting times ahead of us, and I’ll try to explain some of it next time, but if our current plan holds, we’ll start filling the dam next Monday. That will be a stressful day – 1st of all because it will be a “test by water pressure” of our design and construction, and because when we initially filled the dam in 2011 most of the water seeped away into cracks in the rock, and lots of heartache resulted from that problem. We won’t know if we learned the right lessons from those events until after we start filling the dam. Please pray for us on that day and for the filling of the dam.
Let there be good water for all!!
Bon Dlo por Tout
Before I report on the technical stuff and on our work progress, I’d like to paint a word picture of the canyon we work in. The Mountains rising steeply above us are covered with a patchwork of farmed plots and some scrub brush, much of which defies the imagination that it could be farmed. Goat trails meander through the entire mountainside, and provide the transportation route to get to the farms, and to bring the produce back down. Prior to our work the Village of Lastic, a miserable collection of about a dozen mud huts, was about three miles from the nearest road that could be traversed by a 4X4 vehicle. In the early phases of the work the road was extended through the village and on another ¼ mile or so to our jobsite. Beyond our worksite the mountains rise in waves as far as can be seen, and climb from our jobsite elevation of 2400’ until they reach the top of Pik la Selle, about four miles to the South at 8800’. A large amount of traffic passes through our jobsite every day en route to the river for water, to do laundry, or simply passing to unknown villages in the distant hills. Sometimes cattle or goats are driven through on their way to market, and bags of mountain produced charcoal are “head carried” out to market. The rough road that we carved into the site, with steep hills, gravelly section where the trucks spin out, etc. has become the main commercial highway in the area!We have a small fairly flat work area where we can turn a gravel truck around. In one corner is our container used for secure storage. In another corner is a tent we have erected for our foreman/night watchman, Leesyan. Nearby is the fire pit where the cook and her helper toil daily producing the noon meal for our entire labor force. Alongside the container a local entrepreneur has set up a little kitchen, and prepares little deep fried treats for sale to the workers. Across the turnaround area another enterprising soul or two have their little selection of goods arrayed on the ground, hoping for a sale to the cash rich workers. In a canyon with a barter economy, we are now paying about 130 workers cash wages of nearly $3000 a week, an amount I’d guess was only seen on an annual basis before.
The footwear of choice for the men seems to be big black rubber boots, especially those that are obviously oversized. Most of the men are sporting a new pair, we see other “new to them” clothes (the majority of the people in Haiti wear used clothing imported in bales from the US). A couple of days ago, our cook and her helper both showed up for work in new dresses! As in brand new, sewed especially for them, new dresses! The cook’s is a pleasant bright purple, and her helper’s was a tiny floral print. To the best of anybody’s knowledge, the cook has worn the same dress each and every day since we started four years ago. After one day of purple, we’re now back to the old one.
And the children! We have about 75 women on the payroll, and a large number of them have families. I would guess that most of their children from about 8 years old and down are also in the camp area, with the older ones sitting and holding those from about the age of three down to several that are only weeks old. They sit in ragged rows around the site with wide open eyes, and watch everything we do. They are remarkably well behaved, and seem to have endless patience. When it’s feeding time, the mother will break away from the rock haul, come take care of business, and be back to work in short order. Our daughter Kellie spends hours in that pack, playing with the infants, teaching English and learning Creole with the little kids, and doing a cross cultural immersion.
Many of these children are clearly suffering from malnourishment, many are actually sick because of the “hunger time” going on since the crops were destroyed by the hurricanes, and it very likely that what we have mistaken for patience is actually a lack of energy to run and play, or otherwise act like a normal kid. Our workers have supplied some of the ones without clothes with some small garments. If you want to see some proud little boy, imagine giving a four year old his first pair of pants, and watch him strut around and show them off to the entire world!
Every day we have an opening and closing ceremony as each worker turns in his time card, gets his shovel, wheelbarrow, or whatever tool he will use for the day, and is assigned to a crew with a specific task. In the evening the process is reversed, the tools are handed in, and every worker that is expected to return is given his employee card back again, which they guard very jealously. One day last week some of our crew observed the children playing “work”. They had little bits of paper, each one came up and handed them in, where given a stick “tool”, and then started carrying rocks around. Over on the side the little girls were busy playing cook. I didn’t see it, but they reported it was as much fun as a circus.
And speaking of the cook, I must tell you about the employee cafeteria. It is Haitian custom that an employer is responsible to feed his workers while they are on duty. In an urban environment this would usually mean that each worker would get a daily meal stipend in addition to their regular wage, and they could go out at lunch time and buy a meal. Since the noon meal is their big meal of the day, and there is obviously no other place nearby were even a small group could get lunch, we have hired the above mentioned cook and provided the tools and raw materials for her to work with.
If you take three rocks about the size of a pint jar and lay them in a triangle with about a 4” gap in between, a round bottomed 3 gallon pot called a “chodye” will sit comfortably on top of them. A small fire can be lighted with sticks poked in from all three ways, and the fire can be easily controlled by adjusting the sticks in and out to make a larger or smaller flame. Another pot for the meat or onion sauce can be added by placing another two rocks nearby and the next pot resting on them and leaning against the main rice pot. A small amount of the fire can be transferred, and now there are a couple more holes to feed the sticks in.
The menu doesn’t vary much. The base is rice in large quantities, with a small amount of beans or lentils mixed in. She also prepares a meat sauce from the canned chicken we buy for her, and a small amount of that is poured over the top for flavoring, and usually a few rings of raw onion laid over the top. Back at the start of the project we were advised to provide one chicken for every twenty workers twice a week. Don’t think of a plump 4 lb barn raised broiler with some fat; think a skinny 1.5 lb bantam that has never been feed anything in its life, and has been chased daily by dogs in hope of a meal, and you can see what even a little bit of canned chicken can do on a daily basis. Because of our larger than normal work force, she is cooking about 1 ½ 25KG bags of rice per day! That’s about 83 lb of rice per day, cooked to perfection over a fire in three large chodyes!
We also have a repair dept. Since we have tools and a welder on site, the locals bring little broken things to be fixed, and they have huge faith in our ability to take a pile of scarps and make it right again.
And then there is the sick ward. We’ve had two workers injured by dropping the rocks they were carrying, one on the hand and one on the foot. These are our first two “lost time accidents” in our hired crew in the four years we’ve been working. We take them down to the clinic in Fond Parisien about once a week to be seen by a nurse, but the rest of the time I change their dressings in the canyon every second day. While we are working at that it is not unusual for somebody else to show me a wound, an ulcerated sore, or some other problem caused by daily life in a Haitian canyon, and we do what we can with them.
Two weeks ago a girl of about 14 came walking out of the mountains and asked for help. Per her story, about three days earlier when gathering firewood, a branch she was trying to break off whiplashed and ripped her top lip off from one side to the other. It was hanging down the side of her mouth, and splinters of the wood were still embedded in it. My son Jalen ran her down the mountain in the Ranger to look for help. The first clinic they went to refused to stitch it because the wound was several days old, but the second place they tried agreed to help. They did a good job of cleaning it up and stitching it back together, and provided them with additional dressings and both pain pills and antibiotics. Every several days she came back out to our site to have her dressings changed, and finally a few days ago we took her back to the clinic for another doctor visit, and to have the stiches removed. She lives about a five hour walk across the mountains, so it’s unlikely we’ll see her again, but the repair to her face, and the chance for her to live a productive life instead of being a hideous outcast, made it a very rewarding experience.
Meanwhile, back on the ranch . . .
We have been doing a small amount of work amid the daily life that swirls around us. Last update we had just laid the base course of the new dam. That work progressed steadily, and the final of about 225 yards was placed on the 9th of February, well run through with six tons of steel. We then moved on to building a splash pad for the spill pipes, and to bank reinforcement, with an eye toward future erosion prevention. The one storm caused breach to the canal wall has been rebuilt. We breached the wall in one place to allow us to wheel barrow gravel and supplies through. Now that our dam concrete has been poured, that one should be repaired shortly. We’ve added some thrust blocking, and the fountain in the Village of Le Roche has been rebuilt higher up the bank in an area that’s somewhat protected by trees, which will hopefully protect it from future erosion pressure.
Next up will be a mix of repairs and strengthening projects. We are modifying the control gate locations for what we believe will be easier and better control of the water. We have also added significant protection the mouth of the canal so we can prevent the big storm driven rocks from entering, and have planned for a steel gate that can be dropped down to completely close off the canal. The materials for this gate are in the container, and we’ll start its construction as soon as we can get the goods through customs.
The nine km long pipeline that connects to the dam/canal/headworks we have built follows the riverbed most of its journey to the farming valley. We did one repair last summer to a spot exposed by a storm, and Hurricane Sandy exposed it in two more spots, which we will be encasing in concrete. With the huge amount of overburden removed from the riverbed by Hurricane Sandy, by my estimate as much as 250,000 yards per running mile, this might be a recurring problem. It is possible that someday the upper section will need to be re-laid or exposed and encased in place, but that’s another day . . .
Our group of volunteers has been working hard and enjoying the project as well. Today the house has 17 in residence – Jalen left this morning and Carlin arrived this afternoon. He was the last one scheduled in, and most of us here now have one way tickets, so we’ll finish the project and make our way home. There has been a little GI disruption, and almost every day somebody stays home from the canyon to be nearer to the “facilities”. That combined with the usual insect bites, unexplained rashes, an a large swelling on the leg of yours truly the size of half a grapefruit keeps it all interesting.
While all of this has been going on, we’ve also been working with the Water Committee trying to move the administration along. In a meeting about 10 days ago we made some real headway on the budget and administration. We have rented an office, and hired a full time administrator for the proudly named “Pwoje Iragasion de Lastic/Fond Parisien”. He will have a full time assistant with some office duties and some field oversight. Next in line is the chief Sentinel (ditch tender) with his five assistants, and we’ve even got a janitor on staff for an hour a day! Up in the canyon our foreman and the Village of Lastic Chief is a man named Leesyan. He and his son have been hired for security of the dam and canal, and will be responsible for the operation of the gates, keeping the grates and sand traps clean, and minimizing “dezod”, or mischief. The entire operation, including 11 employees from administrator down to the janitor, office rent and supplies, transportation, the ever present miscellaneous account, and a monthly stipend for the three man Board of Directors, will be covered by our annual operating budget of $15,300 USD. In addition, we will be collecting about $15,000 USD for the capital improvements fund. As the funds in that account grow, we will start making improvements to the system, and possibly expand the system to additional farm ground that we cannot currently reach.
There is a farmer group in the area called the “Planters Group”. These men had thought that if the water ever came they would be in charge of it. When we held community meetings last year, and discussed the system upgrades and repairs that were to be done over the summer, they also expected to be in charge of the funds. As many have learned in this and similar cultures, such funds have a strange way of diminishing, and seldom last until the end of the project. After the attenders at last summer’s meeting approved the repairs, we went ahead and got them done. This effort was spearheaded by our animator Fre Bob, Sam Willhite, and our local minister Fre Brutus. We have completed some very necessary upgrades and storm damage repairs, and we completed it only 3% over the approved budget. This amount is a loan to the irrigation project, and will be the first thing to be repaid from the capital improvements fund. Our brother Brutus has agreed to be the treasurer for the district, since he has the respect and trust of the entire community.
After we had heard some rumblings in the community that the Planters Group was accusing us and the various locals involved of doing a power grab for the water, and other unpleasantries, we invited their leadership to a meeting at the district office. It was well attended by about 20 of them, including the three main agitators. In it we laid out our budget, plans for administering the water, the key employees, the maps, and every component that we could. There were some heated discussions, but when they heard that the repairs had been completed so close to budget, and when they heard the final amount that will be charged for the water, they started to listen much closer to what we had to say. We parted on good terms, with handshakes all around. Apparently they have had several meetings themselves since then to discuss the whole project, and today their leader came to the office and told our administrator that they had decided “to walk with us”. Their members have been advised to pay their water fees as soon as possible, and to be on board and support the canal workers. This is a huge answer to prayer, because a number of the group are influential community members, and to work without their continuing support would be very difficult.
There are a number of conversion factors involved, and translation of the costs will be a little difficult. Most business transaction here are handled with a monetary sum called a Haitian Dollar (HD), which does not exist in fact. They use a land measurement system called a Kawo, and often speak of a quarter of that as a Ka. All that being said, we will charge 275HD per Ka for annual access to all the needed water, which equates to roughly $41 US/acre. For a comparison, a few days ago I spoke with a local grower whose land is outside the district. He can get water from a well that is run by another aid group. He purchases as much fuel as he can afford, delivers it to the group, who pours the fuel into the tank of the diesel pump engine. They start the engine, and the water is his until the pump runs out of fuel. This costs him about 220HD per Ka for ONE IRRIGATION. When he found out what we would charge only a little more for a year’s water, he said “It is a gift! It is a gift!”.
A number of the locals had enough faith to plant their crops on schedule even though the system was not in operation. Those bean crops are just now coming into bloom, and are getting pretty dry. We were all prepared to run a little water into a clean out on the pipe so that the beans could be watered, and then both Saturday and Sunday nights we had good rains. This could herald an early end to the dry season, but since we are about completed in the canyon, I don’t think it will hinder our work.
There are interesting times ahead of us, and I’ll try to explain some of it next time, but if our current plan holds, we’ll start filling the dam next Monday. That will be a stressful day – 1st of all because it will be a “test by water pressure” of our design and construction, and because when we initially filled the dam in 2011 most of the water seeped away into cracks in the rock, and lots of heartache resulted from that problem. We won’t know if we learned the right lessons from those events until after we start filling the dam. Please pray for us on that day and for the filling of the dam.
Let there be good water for all!!
