Our town, our country and the world

Thanks for being our partners in this mission

freddv — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:44:28 +0000

Campus Crusade for Christ — Christmas Thank You from Masterworks on Vimeo.

Testimony

freddv — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:00:35 +0000

Global Aid Network (GAiN) drilled a water well in Segourou gah and the village life was transformed.

Toliko Sannon Tchabi Louis, the secretary for the borehole committee, said: “I thank God for the well He gave us through GAiN because it is doing a lot of good to the village. The water from the pump helps to fight against water-related diseases and illnesses that we used to suffer from – diarrhea, vomiting, and fever. We used to drink water from the stream that is 1.5 km from the village and our women wasted a lot of time fetching the water and then waiting for the dirt to settle. Unfortunately, we used to go to the same stream to fetch water for building and other uses. During wedding ceremonies or funerals, a lot of people would fall sick due to the quality of water we gave them. But, we suffer no more. We thank the Lord and thank GAiN.”

Shortly thereafter, the JESUS Film was shown and the village had an opportunity to hear about the Living Water. Fifty out of the 312 that attended decided to leave their worship of Voodoo and become followers of Jesus.
To help strengthen the existing believers as well as ensure growth and follow-up of the ones that made first-time commitments, an Assemblies of God church was planted in the village, allowing the Gospel to shine in the darkness of Voodoo.

Hygiene training

freddv — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 14:19:16 +0000

“It was exciting to see this reaction to Alfonses teaching happening and you could see in the faces of the villagers that they were fully engaged and learning”.

This was the enthusiastic report of a visiting colleague that attended a hygiene training in a rural village in Benin.

Alfonse had developed an approach that actively engaged the villagers in the learning process. The interaction between Alfonse and the villagers was really quite strikingly different from what previously happened in similar trainings. In those previous times the villagers politely listened to the lesson and rarely responded. With Alfonse leading the training, the villagers spontaneously responded to his questions.

This hygiene training is a standard addition to the drilling of a well, together with a technical training for several members of the village that are assigned by the villagers to care for the well. To do so they gather a small contribution from those who use the well so that future repairs can be paid from that fund and the village is not dependant on GAiN any longer. Of course our teams do stay in touch with the villages for a long time and are always available to help in case the need is there for bigger operations.

Ensuring long-term disease-free water

freddv — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:15:52 +0000

It’s is a necessity for thousands of people in Northern Benin.
Throughout all of the 27 villages GAiN visited during a trip in late 2010, 92% of GAiN’s water wells were functional. All but two were working and those wells either just broke or the borehole committee hadn’t contacted the local team to fix it.
Dennis Fierbach, GAiN Canada’s Water for Life Director, was not surprised at the percentage. “Our goal is to create sustainable wells,” he comments. “In the last five years, we have had a very high retention of ongoing working wells.”
The key to this success has been creating an ongoing presence in each village where a well has been drilled. A borehole committee is set up, a small fee is collected by the committee to ensure that small repairs can be done, and a local GAiN team is made accessible for any major repairs.
“What we have noticed is that there have been some organizations throughout Africa that have drilled wells and then left. Instead, we want to ensure that people continue to stay healthy and disease-free, which requires creating water projects that are effective long-term,” explains Dennis.

In December 2010, Dennis saw a well that did just that!
Not too far from the Nigerian border is a deep-capped well that GAiN drilled in Sandilo village on November 22, 2007. Due to its remote location, GAiN had not been back in a while but the systems had been in place so that the well was still producing clean water. There is a woman in charge of maintaining it and collecting the money needed for any repairs.
Within the last few months of 2010, GAiN expanded the project to include rehabilitating wells drilled by other organizations that were either abandoned or had their pumps broken.
Since most of these wells used special pumps, a majority of the parts were too expensive for the villagers to purchase. Therefore, without an ongoing NGO presence in the area to ensure longevity, these wells were no longer usable.
As a result, instead of drilling a new well, GAiN worked with the government of Benin and created a list of 20 wells that could be rehabilitated, restoring the disease-free water it was once providing for thousands.
Peperkou and Tempegre were the first two villages on that list. Both had good wells but no working pumps. Dennis was able to witness the crew installing the new concrete pads and pump bodies. After revitalizing the well, GAiN setup a borehole committee for the villages, trained them to maintain it and then planned for other community development opportunities such as hygiene and sanitation trainings.

To date, GAiN has now drilled 250 wells in Benin, providing over 200,000 people with pure water.

GAiN Water for Life and education

freddv — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 09:08:39 +0000

•   An estimated 140 million children are out of school and among them 80% live in in Africa (UNESCO)
•   Girls and women spend an average of three hours per day collecting water from distant sources. (WTN, 2007)
•   Every year of education a woman receives increases the likelihood of survival for her children by 15% (UNICEF)

Education is of immense importance but for large groups in the third world also almost unreachably far away. Hundreds of millions of children live in houses and town without good facilities as clean water, toilets and schools.
And if there is a school, many of the kids have no time or energy to concentrate because they are sick or (in the case of the girls) have to help getting water and doing other chores to help the family.
Drilling a deepwater well in or near a village reduces these problems in several ways.
Because the water is not only clean, but also closer, the health of the villagers improves remarkably. More available water means better hygiene and a better life, especially for the children. As a result they have more energy and time to go to school.
Adding a well on the schoolgrounds – which are many time centrally located between villages makes the schools also a very effective place to teach about hygiene and other related issues. This kind of info actually spreads faster from the children to the parents then the other way around.
Also school are the center of other initiatives in the sphere of livelihood programs that help the children and the community. The next story is an example of this…

At a school in Tanzania, the students have developed a vegetable garden behind the school. Because of the presence of plenty of water from the well they can irrigate the plants well so they have a good harvest.
They cook the vegetables at school and eat them as part of their daily food.

Water and agriculture

freddv — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 12:13:29 +0000

Clean water has an enormous impact on the welfare of the whole surroundings. When GAiN staff met the Tanzanian pastor Jeremiah he showed with pride his garden and shed with 1100 chickens.
The success of this is only possible thanks to the well that was drilled by GAiN Water for Life.
His garden and chicken shed in the village of Mkwajuni are flourishing. With the proceeds he can provide for his family but also help those of his church members, even in the dry season.
“We were in a desert before this well,” Jeremiah expresses. “We had no water source in this village nor in the village that was closest to us. Instead we had to walk to ditches to retrieve some sort of water.” With the remaining proceeds, he also helped support a new church he had planted in a
village ten kilometers away where GAiN had drilled a water well.

GAiN’s impact has gone beyond providing clean water. It is also helping local people be
effective, resourceful and successful among other leaders within their own communities.

At Mtama Secondary, located in a village just a few kilometers from Jeremiah’s garden, were 530 students (some of which were boarders at the school) that initiated a similar idea. By using the excess water from the well, the students built a garden that allowed them to harvest vegetables, cook them and eat them as part of their daily meals. Not only had this well
brought health to the children and the community, but it had brought nourishment and
sustenance through food.

One visiting colleague notes: “More leaders are starting to catch the vision for how clean water can help with their economy. The deep-capped wells are really being utilized. Not only is each well constantly pumping clean water for thousands of people, but it is creating sustainable and profitable solutions for the local people.”

Clean water and Living water

freddv — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 11:27:52 +0000

Water is of crucial importance for Life. But to really live we need more. Mankind can be very successful, physically and materially speaking, but still be deeply unhappy. Happiness and inner peace and satisfaction are not dependant on material wellbeing.
GAiN is connected with a worldwide Christian network – as a part of Campus Crusade for Christ International. And because of this most of our ongoing contacts are going through those channels, the local Christians and churches.
This way of working has also been agreed upon with the governments of the countries we work in (Benin even specifically asked for it).
The Follow-up includes – besides the training related to the water – that we make contact with a nearby church and train a small group of people there in different aspects of ‘spiritual follow-up’. Over a period of a few weeks we form a cell-group that learns (from our staff of the Jesusfilmteam) how to teach others from the Bible using a simple follow-up bible study series.
That cell group then accompanies the Jesusfilmteam to the ‘new village’ and together they show the movie ‘Jesus’. All is done in communication and under approval of the elders of the village who are normally more than happy to see this movie come to their village as it is much appreciated by Christians and Muslims alike. Since the end of 1979 it has been dubbed in more than 1100 languages and is still being shown in many countries all over the world.
People that want to know more afterwards are being contacted and followed up by the members of the original cellgroup from the nearby church. Through this new relationships are being formed between people from the different villages.
And so, many times within one or two weeks, a new church starts. And not only that. The whole process of follow-up and training results many times in a strengthening of the social life of the whole village society.
GAiN does help many newly formed churches in their effort of building a ‘church’. Mostly by covering part of the expenses (the roofing material is normally the big expense). The building of the structure is done by the people themselves.

Opwekking was a success

freddv — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 10:53:00 +0000

55000 people praising God in an open air meeting! Also, our goal of making GAiN known more could not have been gone better. Our trailer was visible from all directions and far away.
We handed out 1500 bottles of water and discountcoupons in exchange for email addresses to expand our information network. Got more then 2000 new contacts.

Preparing for ‘Opwekking’

freddv — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 15:28:51 +0000

‘Opwekking’ (Revival) is the name of a weekend conference that is held every year at Pentecost and the last years there have been around 50,000 visitors. This year GAiN will be very visibly present as our large trailer will be parked right beside the main pathway.

1500 bottles

In it we will show Christian movies (a cooperative effort with the distributor) and promo video’s of our ministry among the holocaust survivors and about Water for Life!
So this week we did the last preparations.

A supermarket donated 1500 bottles of water to use in promoting Water for Life!

And also just this week I finished the brandnew promo-video about the history and strategy of Water for Life.

video editing

And now we see how many of those thousands of people will stop by and give us their (email)address so we can continue to inform them about these great projects.

The results of better water

freddv — Thu, 26 May 2011 15:00:25 +0000

The follow-up of the GAiN Water for Life projects help to strengthen the participants in all areas of their lives. The improved water quality helps them with a better health – this is true especially for small children. But with the well there is also the reality of having enough water to live cleaner. When there is not enough water, children will seldom be washed… These aspects of cleanliness are being emphasized in the hygiene training that is being given by our follow-up teams.
The presence of more clean water nearby also has the effect of allowing women and girls to do other things – besides fetching water and cooking. Girls can more often go to school now.
There is more time available to grow crops and also the available water can be used for irrigation – resulting in larger harvests and better quality of food. Also there is clean water to let the animals drink more –resulting in stronger and healthier livestock.
The training that we provide in the various technical and management aspects that are needed to ‘run’ the well help to make the village more independent. The management and upkeep of the well is a matter for the whole village. People safe together for the necessary funds and leadership is provided by a committee, together with the village leaders.
With the training we also touch on the role division between men and women. Who does which work… This results many times in situations where the men start to take extra responsibility for the family. For example by fetching the water themselves.

A handicapped woman expressed her joy over the new well:
I cannot get the water myself so my children have to go out to do that. But before, when they had to walk several miles to the river, I was always afraid that something would happen to them. Wild animals or bad people… Now this clean water is much closer to our house. We are healthier , they come back much faster, and I don’t have to be afraid any more.