Last March, I had the opportunity to lead the NLCF mission team to Danlí, Honduras for a week of evangelism, teaching, community engagement, and more. At the beginning of the week, we visited the small community of Los Quiscamotes, where a previous GCLA mission team had built a house. Our main purpose that day was to see an example of the types of projects teams like us could work on in the future. While we were there, however, I noticed a water pump, and started asking questions.
You see, before I went into full time ministry with NLCF, I studied Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech. A lot of what I learned about surrounded the idea of water. One of my favorite classes in graduate school was about water and wastewater in developing countries. From that class, we had seen and talked about hand pumps just like the one I saw that day. I got excited to finally experience something I’d heard about in the classroom! A few minutes later, our friends explained how the beautifully built hand pump was no longer being used because it had been contaminated from a nearby latrine. Now, the locals retrieved their water each day from a small spring in a deep ravine nearby.
I felt something that day. I felt God saying, “Do something about this”. At the time, I didn’t know what that would look like. Fast forward to the summer, and the idea crossed my mind to utilize the resources surrounding me at Virginia Tech. I reached out to my old department, and proposed the situation in Los Quiscamotes as a Senior Design Project idea. Long story short, the idea moved forward, and now I’ve been working with a team of four engineering students from the Biological Systems Engineering department for the past semester. We are hoping to design both short term and long term potential solutions to help provide safe access to clean water. I’m very excited to say that two of those students will be joining our NLCF team to travel back to Honduras in March. Our plan for this trip is to begin scratching the surface of the situation; we hope to take measurements, estimate water quality, and begin conversations with the members of the community. Meanwhile, the rest of the team will be involved in that, among other projects and activities such as working with schools, evangelizing, and building a floor for someone’s home.
What started as a lecture in a classroom, turned into a moment of calling to action from God, and is now moving forward into something bigger than I ever imagined.
We’ll see where things go from here!
-David M