Our Turning-over Ceremonies

A group of school children filing in for the closing/handing-over ceremony of their new school latrine. About 300 children attended, plus the school staff and community members.

This group of young women started off the program by singing a welcome song to us, then added a Christmas song, since it is still considered the Christmas season here in the Congo. They had very sweet voices.

Here are our guys -- our two site monitors in the green shirts (Walter and Francois), who monitor all work every day as construcion takes place and then reports to us what is happening. The man in the suit is Albert Embimen, the engineer and head of the non-profit organization of the project that we partnered with. We provide the funds, he does the work. We have come to love these three fine men. This photo shows them receiving certificates from us for the great job they did.

The back of the brand-new latrine, with our friends, including our translator, Felix, on the far left. The sign says,"This project made possible by the grace of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, carried out by the NGO (non-profit organization) EBAT". The lettering was being finished during the ceremony.

After the latrine hand-over (which means the Church hands over the project to the school or community, and now the school or community has total responsibility to sustain/maintain it), we moved down to the Waters of Mormon spring project for another handing-over ceremony. This picture is of yet another of our site monitors, Eric, with the village chief. He is cutting the ceremonial ribbon to open the spring for his villagers' use.

Inbetween ceremonies, we went to see another potential project. We had to walk a ways, and on our way down a hill to the site, we came across this huge ravine where the Chinese are building a concrete run-off ditch to prevent erosion. To see the size of this, you will want to zoom in. You'll see the workmen at the bottom of the ravine. As you can see, there are homes built on the edge of this ravine that hopefully will remain standing now that the ditch is in place.

At the next ceremony a few days later, the 10 hand-dug wells and school latrine project were also handed over to the community. This is the village chief taking the first drink of pure water from one of the wells. We were very pleased that President and Sister Jameson and Elder and Sister Stagg asked to accompany us to this ceremony. We think they enjoyed it and got a better feel for what we do here.

This is a very special picture to us. The engineer for this project is Masha Gideon the tall guy in the white. With him is his father. Masha proved to be an excellent engineer who worked very hard to make this project an outstanding one. We are sad that the project is at an end and we won't be associating with these good people as we have been.

Earlier in the week we visited some of our wells and heard some drums being played nearby, so we ambled over to see what that was all about. A young albino boy entertained us with some religious preaching and singing. Afterwards, I went up to him to shake his hand, and he wouldn't let my hands go -- he was fascinated that mine were the same color as his! Unfortunately, he has very poor eyesight and can only see up close. Sunlight is very hard on these children.

We have two more handing-over ceremonies this next week, so undoubtedly you will see more similar pictures on the next blog.

Thanks for your patience. We realize these pictures mean far more to us than they can to you. You just have to be here to understand......

We hope you had as great a week as we did. We love you!