Playing with Water & Dirt: One Man’s Story of Service

Note from Mike: Rob Pettigrew is a long-time Living Water International partner, formerly serving on our board of trustees and currently serving on our advisory board. Here, he tells the story about his lifelong calling to share a cup of water, for life, in Jesus’ name. This is an extended story, which we’ll share over three separate posts.

A few days ago, I got a donor survey from Living Water.  At the bottom was a question about how I got involved in Living Water.  After thinking back for a few minutes, I finally wrote "lifelong calling." This is my story.

I enjoyed playing with water and dirt as a kid. In August 1980, National Geographic had an article called Water: Our Most Precious Resource describing the potential water crisis in the US. There was recognition that fresh water was a limited resource, polluted and becoming depleted. There would not be enough fresh water to go around. As I read the article, I saw a problem to be solved and something meaningful to do. Vaguely, I had a career plan and I might get to play with water and dirt. 

Also in the early 1980's, Jim Palmer and Larry Elliott were young missionaries to Honduras. Larry had come to be a hospital chaplain, Jim to do social work. But, in a country that to this day needs more potable water, they saw the urgent need and set out to fix the problem. First, they used a small rig, then needing something to work in the rocky terrain of Honduras, they obtained a much bigger one and Larry drove a large used truck-mounted Failing 1250 drilling rig from the United States through Mexico and Guatemala to Honduras. They started drilling wells and realized they needed some help. 

Baylor is not known as an engineering school, but they did have a geology program and for two years they offered engineering geology. That seemed to deal with water and dirt and the fact that my whole family had gone there was enough to convince me to go. As part of our field classes, we drilled water wells with a tiny rig and I learned about dams and watersheds. I was one of two graduates of the program. 

What is God doing in your life right now?

George Allen was a geology student at Baylor and is a lifelong friend with a gift of encouragement. He seems to reach out at all the right times. His gift is the questions he asks. They all seem to lead to one thought: What is God doing in your life right now? The encouragement is in the implication that God is always doing something and that I am worth God doing something with me. One evening George invited me into a classroom at Baylor to see slides of missionary kid life in Ethiopia (back when slide projectors of film camera photos were a thing!). Stan Cannata had come to Baylor as the son of a medical missionary. He wanted to study hydrogeology so he could drill wells and tap springs back home. That night Stan just showed slides and talked about the crazy times growing up in an under-resourced African nation. There was no mention of commitment or calling. Just hey, here is my funny life story. When I left that evening, walking just a just a few feet from the door of the classroom, a question came into my mind, clearly distinctly and with powerful impact. What about you? 

I had recently read a new book by Charles Colson called Loving God. Its thesis is that loving God is not about worship or praise or even time in prayer and meditation. Loving God is about obedience. When I walked out of that classroom, I gave the only response I could without renouncing my faith. Yes, Lord I will.

When I told my church that God had called me to do something, I had a problem when they asked, “What?” I was not called to be a fulltime missionary. I was not called to seminary. I only knew vaguely, it had something to do with water.   

I had to wait three years to get any clarity. I stayed at Baylor for graduate school, studying hydrogeology.   My thesis was on a water supply aquifer in West Texas sitting on basement rocks. Once again George Allen led the way. Jim Palmer had come to Baylor to talk about mission work for the Baptist Student Union. I had never been to a BSU event at Baylor, just because there was so much else to do. George introduced me to Jim, who said they needed a driller or a mechanical engineer to help in Honduras. I was positive before anyone else where I needed to be. 

I arrived in Honduras in February of 1989 and spent two years there. Just as I was arriving in Honduras, I got word that Stan Cannata, who was back in Ethiopia searching for springs, had rolled over a cliff in a vehicle and died in the fall. I didn't so much grieve as ponder, What had he done wrong? Had he been unsafe, dumb? Stan had a fiancé, also committed to missions, serving in West Africa. It was tragic. Stan's death was a piece of my puzzle that didn't fit anywhere, so it became stuck in a drawer in the back of my mind.

Learning in action

I learned a lot from both Larry and Jim in those two years and figured out a few things by myself, the hard way.  

•      We put ourselves under the leadership of the local church. We did not work for the Foreign Mission Board (as it was called at the time), although they funded our work. We worked for the Honduran National Baptist Convention, and it was on the sign on the door of the rig in Spanish for all to see. 

•      The community has to own it. Larry introduced me to Herb Caudill. Herb was the son of missionaries to Cuba and had spent years working for USAID. He told me how Latin America was littered with broken water systems installed by well-meaning aid workers who built great systems but never got the community to feel like it was theirs. 

•      You have to meet people where they are. Jim had a master's in social work; he kept talking about participatory development and he seemed to spend a lot of time just talking to people. I came to learn that talking was just as important as doing. We can't just show up with our answers and tell people what they need. They have to feel the need as a priority.  

•      The hardest lesson, I figured out on my own: You can't help everyone because those most in need are sometimes the hardest to reach. I went with a British hydrogeologist working for Honduran government to look at a community. They were living in shacks in the middle of a river floodplain. No trees, no electricity, no roads, and shacks that would be swept away in the next flood. Not idyllic primitive conditions, just dirty and sick and no money to do anything about it. A well would have flooded, a house would have collapsed. But they had neighbors, a community not far away, and the well would have to go there. Aid does not alway go where the need is greatest, but where it can be received.  

•      A final lesson came a few days before I left Honduras, I stood next to a pastor at dusk looking out the open window of a newly constructed church. The church had no electricity and was in the middle of a community of refugees perched high on a mountain above Tegucigalpa. No one had water. We looked out the window across a deep canyon. On the other side was the Honduran national beer factory. It was lit-up with security lights. It glowed in the dusk. Inside the fence were huge tanks of water used in the process. The pastor turned to me and said, as the interior shadows of the church darkened, They have light, but we have the light of the world. They have water but we have the living water. He seemed to be the richest man around.  

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Rob’s story continues. Return to this site soon for the second installment.