Working in Wau
Again, I am sorry that I have not up-dated my blog over the past few weeks. I have been really busy lately with the work here and haven’t had time to sit down and write out what has been happening. Since I wrote last I have moved our operations from the Tonj area to a city west of Tonj called Wau. You can actually find Wau on most maps of Sudan if you would like to look it up. It’s getting further west and is actually about a hundred miles or so southeast of Darfur. We left Tonj two weeks ago loaded down with water tanks, block presses, tools, and men. The road was extremely bad and it took us fifteen hours to go the equivalent of about forty to fifty miles. Eight hours out of that fifteen was spent stuck in giant mud holes, digging out our tractor and vehicles. When a four wheel drive tractor gets stuck in mud, you know it’s a bad road. It was not a good day but God blessed us and we reached Wau after night fall. Our work there has gone well and we will be finishing up with the blocks of our first church, called Khourmadir Church, tomorrow. Preliminary work has already begun at our next church; Majack Church, and we will begin blocks there on this coming Monday morning. So our work in Wau is moving along well and quickly. We’ve got our system down pretty well now so it is making things move a lot quicker. Since this past Monday I have actually come back to Tonj for the week to buy more cement for our work in Wau and to organize our next church so that we can move strait from Majack Church in Wau to there. I met yesterday with the congregation at Thiet Church and took the first eighty bags of cement to the store room there, along with some other tools. It is my hopes that over the next week and a half they will begin their preliminary work as well, allowing me to move my guys all the way from Wau to there. Thiet Church is actually North of Tonj so we will have to drive all the way back to Tonj from Wau and then go strait north two more hours to Thiet. That’s my plan at least so we will see if things go accordingly. I only have three weeks left here in Sudan, before I have to go back to America so it is my hope that as I leave I will have completed the blocks at four churches and will see the blocks being made at the fifth. That would be really great and means that the work here is actually a month ahead of schedule from where I thought we would be when I first arrived here in August. So that is where we’re at right now with the work. I will be going back to Wau with my cement on Sunday morning early, so please be praying for our travel along that road, as it is still extremely dangerous and rough.
There are a few other things I guess I could mention as well. In Wau I’m living in a canvas tent, like the kind that the military uses in the field. It’s small but get’s the job done. I’m eating all local foods now and last Sunday was the first time that I ate cow intestines and this other dish that was green and had the consistency of snot. We killed another green momba snake at the Khourmadir work site and I saw a big Cobra in the middle of the road this past Monday on my way from Wau to Tonj, as well as a family of Baboons crossing the road. I was sick all last week with some kind of intestinal bug and then also a sinus cold as the weather here is changing and getting much hotter. In Wau there are actually a lot of mosques and arabs that live there, so it is a different feel than anywhere I’ve been before. As for prayer requests if you could continue to pray for travels, health, and that work will continue to go smoothly. Those are the main ones right now. Well, I guess I will end here and I plan to write once or twice more before I am back in the U.S. My time here is nearing an end and the days are flying by. It’s been a great experience to this point and I hope to finish strong. Thanks again for reading my blog and keeping up with me and for the prayers that get me through all of the hard times and situations here in South Sudan.
Cliff
posted by Cliff @ 4:30 AM
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