This July we drilled our first wells in a village of about 5,000 people on the border between Kenya and Tanzania. Our goal was to provide for a village that desperately needed fresh water and to learn all that we could about the process in order to be as effective and efficient as possible with this program in the future. Both of these goals were met in a wonderful way.
ZAO means “life,” and this program was developed to take the proceeds from our own water bottling in Moravian Falls to use to drill wells in Africa, where a person dies on the average of every eight seconds from impure drinking water. There is usually pure water just under their feet, but they do not know how to get to it. A single fresh water well in a village can radically change their lives for good and extend their lives considerably.
However, we want to give these villages more than just physical water—we also want to give them the true living water, the gospel of Jesus Christ. So a part of our strategy for the ZAO water is to send teams who not only can do the physical drilling and digging of the wells, but who can also preach the gospel and lay a strong biblical foundation in the new believers in every village where we drill a well, ensuring that each village has a well of living water too.
There were a couple of major lessons Matt Peterson and his team learned on this trip. They chose as their first village a place so remote that a drilling rig could not get there, so the well had to be dug by hand. No problem. There is about 85 percent unemployment even in some of the cities of Africa, and there is plenty of labor available for such projects. However, when Matt sent word ahead to have them begin digging before he got there, they had begun one well right in the middle of the garbage dump, and the other right next to the latrine. They simply had no concept of basic hygiene. When Matt explained to them why this would not work, they were very eager to learn, but no one had ever taught them these things. Such basic teaching on hygiene and health needs to also be a part of our program. Pure water and hygiene training can extend the life of these people on the average of an estimated 85 percent!
In many of the remote villages of Africa the women literally spend at least half of their time carrying water to the village from the closest source, which is sometimes several kilometers away. Most of their lives are spent under the burden of a load of water, often walking through dangerous country to get it. When Matt had the water checked that the village was using, it was from a stream in the middle of a pasture that the cows were trampling, urinating, and defecating in, making it extremely polluted with deadly ecoli.
When the team dug the well and hit the fresh water right in their village, he said he had never seen such rejoicing and worship. The women danced like Miriam, thanking the team over and over with tears of joy. Their lives were not just changed, but profoundly changed. Matt could not keep from crying just in telling about it.
Of course other villages around the one where they dug the well immediately heard about it and came begging to have a well for their village. We want to do this. We can transform a region with this simple plan. Then we want to help transform their nation by bringing to them the goodness of the kingdom of God in every way.
Another important thing learned on this trip was that in areas where other churches and ministries had dug wells before, they were not being maintained when even a hand pump failed from something as simple as a washer. The wells would be shut down and were basically useless because the people did not know how to fix them. Therefore, we want to set up a base in the places where we drill, developing an infrastructure so that every well is also checked and maintained on a regular basis. We want to find the location of all the failed wells and see if we can get them working again, and then put them on a maintenance schedule.
I think this is also a reflection of the way the gospel has often been given to these people. Thank the Lord for the great crusades and the salvation that is flowing out of them, but without follow-up the wells often dry up, and soon the people are back living in the same conditions. We have to develop a spiritual infrastructure as well, having teams regularly visit and check on the churches that are started.
As stated, there is plenty of labor available there for doing this, in the natural and the spiritual. We just need to train the people there how to dig and maintain these wells, and they are very eager to learn. We then want to also teach irrigation and other skills that can have a major impact on their lives, at the same time seeing the Word of God take over more and more of their lives. If we can get the men employed in helping their neighboring villages, who will in turn help their neighbors, it is easy to see how a whole region can be changed. That’s how we want to do it—establish a strong base and build out from it, in the natural as well as the spiritual.
The cost of digging or drilling a well in Africa is only $1,500 to $3,000 dollars. As our ZAO Water grows in distribution, we will have serious resources available for this. To do this though, we still need about $1,000,000 for buildings and the bottling equipment. Once this is going, we could have as much as $10,000 a day or more net income from it. Already we have major outlets for its distribution from some who are willing to pay us more for our water just because of where the proceeds will go.
We greatly appreciate those of you who have been contributing to this, and welcome any others to help keep this project moving forward. You can make a contribution to ZAO WATER, at the address below, or you may want to sponsor the drilling of a well. We will let you know where the well is, and send you pictures, video, etc. This could be a great project for a prayer group, church, or your family, that could change the lives of several thousand people.
ZAO WATER
C/O MorningStar Fellowship Church
Attn: Accounting
P.O. Box 440
Wilkesboro, North Carolina 28697
In the future we also hope to provide opportunities for supporters who would like to join our teams for a trip to Africa. We will keep you posted as this program develops.