Update from CHE Workers

Women pounding grain in the church-yard
(pastor's house in the background).

It’s starting to feel like almost a homecoming to walk into the sandy and half-dilapidated church yard of the big city church in the region where we’ve started the CHE work. The long-time pastor there has been totally onboard with our trainings and the evangelists all eager to come again from 1-2 hours away to meet together. It was very encouraging to see these CHE workers face to face and hear their stories from the past month+.

Implementation Successes – Their efforts to make fertilizer from compost with the 21-day process we taught them worked well! It generated interest from neighbors and had people asking to learn how to do it. We still have to wait to see the proof of how it helps things grow, but I have some experiments on that going in my yard too. One of the evangelists even went the extra mile to do the large-scale compost that will be enough to cover half a field in the planting season. The item I was less certain about was the handwashing stations that help conserve water. In a place where washing hands at any time besides ablutions before prayer is a strange thing, I was worried that the evangelists wouldn’t really be excited to try these stations. But they are all using them in their families. They said their children are even excited to use it before and after eating, and after the bathroom, so they’re obviously keeping up with it and using a manageable amount of water.

Zig-Zag using a hand-washing station
called a "tippy tap" with a foot-pedal.

New Ideas – In this third time that we’ve sat down with the CHes (CHE evangelists) to do new lessons, their eagerness showed their confidence that we’re doing more than just empty talk, but adding helpful practices to their lives. They were very engaged in our lessons on the needs of adult learners and CHE teaching methods to help bridge adult learners from information to action. Then we had an amazing conversation about the practical problem of firewood, it’s dangers and cost in time and money. The lesson was designed to start with a skit on collecting firewood and was meant to lead into a demonstration on how to construct the best kind of clay cooking stove to use less wood. But because CHE is focused on local ideas to solve local problems, the skit lead into the first hour of the discussion of their ideas on how to solve the problems of firewood. The first being that husbands need to help their wives with more of the work that is traditionally thrown on the women, and the second being that they need to be serious about planting trees. Both hugely important ideas that they were recognizing they need to model!

New Believers – I was also very excited to hear stories of new believers in three of the villages. December is typically a time when the church does more evangelism to educate people about what we are celebrating at Christmas and the Good News that Jesus birth brings. But still it is encouraging to hear that in two of the villages there is a new believer who is bringing family to church, which basically doubles the worship attendance in both places. The third village already has a well-established church, but they had a special meeting with new believers who wanted to profess their faith and had 17! I’m not sure that any of these faith journeys were related to the CHE practices we’re teaching, but I do feel like the focus on reaching out to the community and encouragement that we’re giving to these evangelists has contributed to their engagement and confidence with their neighbors. And I strongly believe the prayers of the people who are supporting us and specifically focusing on these CHes is having a big impact on the movement we’re seeing!

-- El Padre