A letter from Sara Armstrong and Rusty Edmondson serving in Peru
december 2014 - water ministry goes viral
Water purification systems go "viral"
We first met Pastor Edgar and his wife, Alejandra, in 2009. They are raising a family, sustaining a church and presbytery, working the family farm, and Edgar has a day job at the elementary school. However, they find time for a water ministry. The Living Waters for the World (LWW) team from the Presbytery of San Gabriel visited with the Maynay Presbyterian Church and the municipality for two years before establishing a covenant with them in 2010.
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Pastor Edgar Lishner Chavez reporting on his work
Over 15,000 Peruvians were resettled in Pastor Edgar's town of Maynay after the Time of Terror (1980-2003). In this area, which has experienced so much violence, it is hard to trust anyone. The fact that most of them speak Quechua, the language of the ancient Incas, made it more difficult. It took us two years to negotiate a four-way covenant before we started building. The water purification system ended up, not in the church, but in the city hall of Maynay. How do you build trust and unity in a town where everyone is new and a stranger to each other? One way is through clean water.
In this area of the Andes Mountains water piped to the adobe homes is contaminated by infectious diseases such as hepatitis. The pastors want the witness of their small church to be for the whole community. You can tell this by their reputation. The church has constructed a Prayer Chapel and they are known as "mighty prayer warriors" for their community.
The Presbytery of San Gabriel team helped to install the system next to the mayor’s office and hundreds of people from the city came to the water celebration. It was a day of prayers, singing, speeches (in Quechua), interviews on the radio (in Spanish), and roasted pig for everyone (a universal language)!
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Pastor Edgar Lishner Chavez and his wife, Alejandra, clean bottles at the water room in the Maynay Municipal Center
Now the pastors operate the system and give free water to everyone who comes. The kids playing ball on the nearby field come running in for water, grandmothers cooking for their families stop by as they shop, the elementary school and the staff of the nearby health clinic both receive 5-gallon bottles. In short, this is a partnership to be celebrated.
But the pastors did not stop there. After they received training from the U.S. team they became Quechua-speaking trainers for new installations in Tambo and Yanama. Then the team's work went "viral." People kept visiting the Maynay system and asking for something similar. The next thing we knew, Edgar was flying to Lima. He had been hired by two municipalities much higher up in the Andes Mountains to install two more systems. We helped with the purchase of parts and he and the city engineer went home happy. We heard in October that the systems were installed. The area was so remote that Pastor Edgar had to walk the better part of a day in the freezing mountain heights to get home after the installation and training.
We visited together recently and he told us about the filters he helped the city of Maynay install. There are three 9 X 3 meter concrete tanks with sand and gravel to filter the water that is piped to homes. The Living Waters system is now connected into the city water system after the sand and gravel tanks so it can purify any remaining impurities and the water can be bottled for human consumption. We were stunned by the immensity of this civic project.
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The Presbytery of San Gabriel Living Waters team (Pastor Edgar and Alejandra in the center) delivers water to the Maynay Health Clinic
Pastor Edgar now proposes to build another system in the jungle and he has asked his church to underwrite it. The parts will have to be carried in as there is no road to this new community. Not only is Edgar ambitious about helping communities to get clean water, he has also become the "go-to guy" for the current systems. When the Tambo water purification system blew out some tubing and flooded the water room, the operators were gone. Edgar received a call and traveled several hours to do the repairs.
The LWW team from San Gabriel is rejoicing in Edgar and Alejandra who have caught the vision for their own community and are making clean water possible for many other people. This is the joy of our work between U.S. teams and Peruvian churches. We thank you for making it possible through your prayers and your support. If you have the same vision for ministry between cultures, we invite you to consider supporting us, or one of the 170 mission co-workers around the globe. Please check out the possibilities at https://www.presbyterianmission.org/donate/MI910073/
¡Que Dios les bendiga ricamente! Saludos y abrazos de Sara y Rusty.
Sara and Rusty
The 2014 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 57
The 2015 Presbyterian Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 54
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