Learning from Mistakes and Heart Break
Note from Mike: In our last post, Rob Pettigrew, a longtime advisor to Living Water, shared early stories of his work bringing clean water to people in Honduras and elsewhere. If you’ve not already read the first part of his story, start here. His story continues below.
A drill team in Northern Iraq.
When I came back to the US in 1991, two images in my mind became my motivation to stay engaged in ministry. One was that of Stan Cannata who rolled over a cliff, leaving unfinished work. The other was the small boy with a distended belly and dirty shorts watching our rig as we drove into the first community in Olancho, Honduras. We locked eyes on each other for just a few seconds. There was no hint of fear or mistrust, just bewilderment and hope.
When the first Gulf War ended in late 1991, there was an opportunity to go and help drill wells in Northern Iraq. It was a volunteer position, but I could afford to go for 6 weeks. I wasn't the most qualified, but I was eager. I met Larry Johnson there. He had come from Peru to direct the well drilling effort. While I was there, I also met a volunteer nurse Chickie Hood. The US had created a no-fly zone at the time to protect the Kurds from Sadaam Hussein's army, so the area from Mosul north to Zahko where we were located was being run by a de facto Kurdish tribes. It was one of the few places where you could enter a country through a regular border crossing and never get a passport stamp.
Chickie Hood, in 1991.
Two things I learned by being really dumb.
We had gone looking for a large turbine water well pump the US military had left at a closing refugee camp. They were going to give it to us. The turbine pump was missing, and we drove around to see what happened to it. Finally, we came upon a truck with what appeared to be a turbine pump sitting in the back. With our Kurdish workers, we approached the truck. Some men got out and explained that this was their pump they loaned the camp. They had had this pump for many years and were moving it back to their farm. As the talking continued, I started examining the turbine. It was clearly marked as property of the US military with a serial number and date. When I pointed this out, Larry waved me off. (He was really patient.) They talked for a while more, shook hands, and the Kurdish farmers drove off with the pump never to be seen again. It took me a while to realize, although we had lost our pump, we had not made an enemy.
We sat on a hillside overlooking the Tigris River valley. The small community had shade trees and an abandoned well. As our Kurdish hosts showed us the well, they explained how Sadaam's army had taken the pump and plugged the well to terrorize the local Kurds and keep them under control. I could see rocks and rubble in the open steel casing. Wondering if we could flush the blockage, I began to remove a few rocks near the top. The Kurds kept talking about how the Iraqi army would block the well by putting animals, waste, rubble, and landmines down the well. The word landmines got my attention. I slowly extracted my hand from the well and began to back away expecting an explosion any minute. I think I got a laugh from the Pesh Merga who were hosting us.
A few months after I got back from northern Iraq, I received word that Chickie Hood had been killed in a car crash while on a short leave in Diyarbakir. As volunteers, all of us stayed in the same compound. Chickie and I were the youngest and got a chance to talk quite a bit. She was on a longer-term assignment. Like Stan Cannata, she was sincere and serious about her work. She was also kind and sweet to everyone. When they had her funeral at the Assyrian church in Zakho, they broadcast the funeral on the radio and hundreds of people turned out. She was genuinely loved by everyone in town. It was tragic and like with Stan, I had another piece of a puzzle that did not fit anywhere.
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My job as an environmental scientist was spent mostly in Texas, but during the 1990s I got to take part in environmental audits all over Latin America, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Columbia, and Chile as well as time in Saudi Arabia on a waste disposal project. I continued to volunteer for church mission trips as well. I helped lead groups to Vera Cruz and other spots in Mexico. I proposed to my wife while standing in the shallow waters of Isla Verde, off the harbor at Vera Cruz, on a day outing with church youth.
Finding solutions in the storm
Hurricane Mitch hit Central America during my first year of marriage. I was sort of checked out on volunteering, but for Larry Elliott in Honduras it meant a whole new direction. Larry delivered food in a dump truck and mobilized churches to respond to the needs. A few years later, the IMB asked Larry to oversee Disaster Response for all of Mexico and Central America. Larry recognized that in a flood, finding potable water is hard. Wells became impacted. Treatment was necessary. In late August 2002, he came to Houston on a mission to design a water treatment system that could be deployed in a disaster. He asked me to go with him on what I thought was a short trip to Dallas to meet with Texas Baptist Men. They had been doing disaster response for years and had a small backpack sized unit for water purification, but Larry realized just a couple of gallons per minute of production was not enough to supply the needs. We needed something larger that could be broken into components and assembled on site. The parts we needed were in San Antonio, so we drove from Dallas to San Antonio and then back to Dallas in about a day. We bought and designed as we went. I typed and drafted figures on my laptop as Larry drove and talked. Back in Dallas at the TBM warehouse, we met other volunteers Larry had recruited from mission trip groups across the US. We crated the parts for shipment to be staged in Honduras. Then we drove back to Houston for Larry to catch his flight to Honduras. We had designed, assembled, and shipped five water purification units with a capacity of 10 gpm each, in the course of about a week. I was exhausted.
There was one problem with the plan. While our crate of water purification units was on a slow cargo ship to Honduras, a hurricane hit the Yucatan Peninsula. It flooded large areas around Merida. We had our solution but no actual parts. My garage at home became a warehouse. We ordered everything again and had it shipped to my house and from there we packed it as luggage in boxes. I talked a friend into flying down to Merida with me and we recruited another guy I knew from mission trips to Vera Cruz. With three of us and some extra luggage fees we got all the parts that couldn't be found locally in Merida. The Mexican National Baptist Convention took over from there and with a short amount of training, they manned five fulltime water supply stations pulling water out of streams and ponds and producing clean potable water. The pilot run was a success.
In March 2003, Larry asked me to go to the Southern Baptist Disaster Relief roundtable at Ridgecrest. The meeting was full of boring presentations, but in the background were hushed conversations about responding to a recent opening to provide humanitarian assistance in Iraq as soon as the invasion of the second Gulf War was complete. Larry had presented the success of the potable water systems in Merida. There was a need for clean water for hospitals in Iraq and Larry got the call to go to Iraq with a volunteer team. We had just had our first daughter in January. I wasn't about to ask my wife about going to Iraq, but the garage again became the logistics hub, receiving parts, packing them for shipment. Larry and the team left Houston for Iraq and installed systems in several hospitals. Larry came back elated. Within a few months, Larry and his wife Jean felt the call to go to Iraq permanently. By January 2004, they were headed to Iraq. On March 15, 2004, gunmen opened fire on the car they were in outside of Mosul, Iraq. Larry and Jean were both killed. Others tell their life story better (see Lives Given, Not Taken, by Jerry Rankin.) For me, my friend and mentor was gone. I and other disaster response team volunteers were pallbearers at the funeral in North Carolina. It was a closed casket due to the damage the bullets had done. WIth Larry and Jean, I had two more pieces of a puzzle that did not fit, but this time they were large, heavy and dark.
Sharing the well
December 26, 2004, an earthquake created a tsunami that wiped out homes and lives in Indonesia and crossed the Indian Ocean, to cause mass damage to the western coast of Sri Lanka.
From Batticola southward, the Sri Lanka coast is a sandy barrier island that has thousands of people living in poor but idyllic conditions. A beautiful well-graded sandy beach leading to well-spaced small cinder block homes in an endless grove of palm trees. Shaded by trees and cooled by ocean breezes, each house also had its own open-top hand-dug well. Water wells are easy on sandy islands. To dig a well, simply place a large concrete ring (like a culvert pipe) on the ground and begin to dig out the sand from the inside.
The ring begins to sink. Once one ring is in the ground you place another and continue till the person at the bottom, now filling buckets of sand to be lifted upward, is standing in several feet of water, 15 to 20 feet below ground. Acting like a giant bio-sand filter, the bacterial water quality is not bad. The last ring stays 4 feet or so out of ground to keep out the animals. But when an island is overtopped by a 20-foot-high wave of sea water, washing away chickens, houses, and lives, the survivors find their wells polluted with sea water and in some cases dead animals.
I had met some of the leaders of the Texas Baptist Men disaster response a few years earlier with Larry. TBM did their scouting in Sri Lanka and began to focus on clean-out of wells along with other NGOs. With small gasoline powered trash pumps and suction hoses, they and a team of national volunteers began to pump out the sea water for 30 minutes or so, one well at a time. It was part of the larger effort of multiple NGOs providing potable water and trying to restore what they could to those left behind. As importantly, they got spend time with the survivors
Being a hydrogeologist and understanding groundwater flow on a sandy island, I uncharacteristically called and forcefully volunteered myself to go. In February 2005, I was on my way to the other side of the world, wearing the TBM uniform. I was a terrible “yellow hat” and not really good at following the needed chain of command in an incident command system, but I did convince the leadership we needed to understand what effect repeated pumping was now having on the wells. There was no doubt that pumping water out of the wells initially was needed, but there were insufficient hoses to move the pumped water far away. The water coming out of the well often ended up only 20 feet away, spilling out and quickly soaking into the sandy ground.
We had brought specific meters so we could measure changes in salinity before and after pumping. I got permission to run my "project" and began to collect data with a team of national volunteers. Humility when working in other countries is always easy to come by. The first day I started my sampling project, I knew we needed to retain some samples so we could verify the readings. I had my yellow field book, my plastic sample bottles, and my all-important waterproof permanent marker to label and write. As I liberally applied bug repellant to avoid mosquito borne disease, I learned that bug repellant dissolves permanent markers. I remember standing in the hot sun, looking at my hands covered in a black running liquid of bug spray and permanent marker that used to be on the bottles I had carefully labeled. I got “laughed at,” but also encouraged as the team of nationals moved ahead down the road, confident we could solve my bug spray problem.
Finally, after two weeks of plotting data location and trend, a picture emerged. Some wells improved and became less salty, others stayed the same and others actually got worse. The locations of wells with deteriorating quality formed long amoeba like paths that corresponded to the lows in topography. These were the areas where the seawater had ponded and had time to soak in. In higher areas, the seawater had run off quickly before it had time to soak into the ground. Groundwater was saline where it had ponded and still of good quality where it had run off. We presented the findings to the governing NGO committee. Repeated pumping of wells was stopped. Each well would be pumped once or twice to remove seawater. The good wells would be marked and then it would be up to a few rainy seasons to flush the seawater down through the aquifer before all the wells could be restored. For a while, water continued to be trucked in from sources inland and the good wells would have to be shared among the survivors.
In October 2004, Cademon’s Call had released an album called “Share the Well.'' I had picked up the CD in the Second Baptist book store and by the time I left for Sri Lanka, the chorus was stuck in my head. “Share the well, share with your brother, Share the well my friend, It takes a deeper well to love one another, Share the well my friend.” As our Sri Lankan brothers in Christ guided us through the palm trees and literally broken homes, we met a man who told us how his whole family had been swept away and only he remained. He was hollow and hurting. We prayed with him. It may have been the most meaningful thing I did in Sri Lanka. In a disaster, we often find ourselves in the chaos of quickly meeting basic physical needs and solving problems. It is easy to forget that the people we are trying to help have just been through an emotional trauma that has not healed in days or weeks or the timeline of a disaster response.
Larry Elliott had taught me about the disaster curve. The poor are in a precarious but stable state. They can feed themselves, to raise a family. They are almost always in “community” with others. Then the disaster comes and basic needs like food, shelter, and water are gone. Their ability to sustain life drops. When disaster aid arrives, water and food are brought to them. For many, they may find themselves eating better, and thirsting less than they had even before the disaster. For a while, their physical needs are met and people seem to care. But the cycle is always the same and aid leaves after a while. The world stops caring and moves on to the next disaster. Victims find themselves have ridden a roller coaster into a state of deeper poverty, worse off than they were before the disaster. Often the roller coaster makes the emotional hurt that much harder. People need relationship and a community and a response that does not pull out after a few months of “fixing the problem.” Showing up is easy but staying for the long haul and rebuilding the community takes a deeper well, one that only the local church and a local community can meet over time.
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Rob’s story continues in a third installment. Visit this site soon for the conclusion.
