Grinding Progress

The director (left) with the grinder.

I knew it was a good sign when I saw the door open of an old building at the edge of the Bible school fence. Our visitors asked what was happening there, and we heard that the building used to house a machine for grinding grains into flour for the daily staple meals. But it hasn’t been working for a number of years. Just a few weeks ago they collected a little money to replace a few parts on the grinder, got it back in working order, and re-instituted the system for students to pay a small fee (the same we pay in our neighborhood) to grind their grains. Now the women don’t have to spend hours pounding it into flour, and people from the few “homesteads” surrounding this rural Bible school can also come to receive the benefit. I got to see this because this month we had a visit from some mission partners who are especially interested in the Bible schools of our partner church. As I work with two of the Bible schools and have heard them talk about their needs a lot as well as seen how they operate, I was struck this time around by the optimistic outlook I feel now. The last six months has been a gradual period of change, especially at the school that I’ve been teaching at on a weekly basis. A new director has come in who is more active and has gotten the students and instructors to take more pride in keeping up the grounds of the Bible school. They’ve made a new entrance path to the school lined with red and white cement markers, put new paint on things, gotten the pump for their well working again, and cleaned up the area around the well where they used to do small scale irrigation for gardens.

At the well with the fenced in garden area behind.

This contrasts with what the first two years of my visits there were like, with a director who didn’t even want to live on campus, complaints about many things, and very little plans for how to change anything. I think this makes the future for this school look pretty bright. I think it will also help that the national church has some plans for how to use the fields a little better to generate more income for the school. But now that they are doing a lot of the little things to help their school, I think it is a place where it’s much more interesting to work on projects for long-term development. The list of needs for both Bible schools in our area is still long. They need to find ways to reverse the trend of getting less yield/profit from the big fields around the schools. They want to introduce irrigation and more efficient management of fields. They would like to start a program for teaching a trade-skill, like carpentry or welding or tailoring, which pastors and evangelists could use to support themselves in communities where the church is still very small or non-existent. Many of the student’s dorm rooms are falling in, making it hard to live or attract new students. Some of the teacher’s housing is crumbling and in danger of falling in. One dorm block gets flooded to knee height during the rainy season because of new drainage for the main road 100 yards away. Most of the students don’t have a church large enough to help them with school fees. Every term they buy a few small paperback books/booklets for their courses, but they don’t have any kind of library of resource books to further their knowledge or studies in any subject. Even though those are a lot of challenges ahead, I get excited to see the little changes being worked on that make it more likely for these big ideas to be attainable.

A cracking dorm building made from mud-brick.

-- El Padre