more on the tank saga

hi all,
the tank didn't make it in by river or by trail and is still sitting
at the end of the road (looking lonely and sad). ECORAE, the
government organisation paying for the project are now paying for a
temparary solution of 4 smaller tanks to make the water system function.
A collegue in the office says he knows people in high places in the
military and can get us the flight...we'll wait and see.
keep praying, only a miricle will get the tank there now!
alex

april leon newsletter

dear Friends,
hope you all had a wonderful Easter and enjoyed the double bank holiday!
attached is the latest newsletter, sorry its taken so long to write!
to make up for the slowness, it includes 2 pages of photos of the last
6 months.

The tank is no longer in Shell, but hasn't arrived at its destination
yet... Adin is taking it in by river and trail, so please keep this in
your prayers.

We have changed our plans a bit for next year, it is now more likely
that we'll be in the UK for about 6 months and not go to the USA to
study this time. keep praying for us as we concrete study options in
the UK.

Benjamin started rolling over this weekend and is showing signs of
wanting to crawl when he is on his front, soon nothing in the house
will be safe from a roaming baby!

keep in touch, we love to hear the goings-on in the UK.
hugs and blessings,
Alex, Alfredo and Benjamin

tank news

we are giving up on waiting for the military to fly in the tank to Amazonas as plan to float it down the river (or rather Juan Velasco has offered to try) please pray! the tank is 2m in diameter and 2m high and the river has some big rapids and the bridge to get to the river has collapsed. this will only succeed with prayer
we'll take lots of photos!

march prayers and praise

photos: Benjamin and Uncle (Tio) Rodrigo, Benjamin the Liga supporter and Benjo eating breakfast

hi there,
sorry we didn't update last month, life got busy with studying for the Wheaton course and trying to get projects finished by deadlines and extension applications handed in on time

Samikim design report got presented on the deadline. Taisha have since come back with corrections, but they are minor, praise God.

Amazonas got an extension (again). we found out this week that the military will definitely not fly our tank in to the jungle, so we have to come up with another plan

Palora is in last days, we are just installing the house connections and doing finishing touches. we are praying that we don't get a fine for not finishing on time and refuse to pay a bribe to get an extension (that should be given anyway)

The course in Quito on Folk Religions was excellent and hard work. we both took the course for credit so had lots of assignments and reading to do in addition to all the project work. Alex has now finished and Alfredo got an extension on the reading assignment as two books are in English and are hard work for him. pray that he reads them before the march 13 deadline.

Benjamin is growing fast! he has started eating cereal and would eat everything on our plates if we let him! he has a huge smile and is very sociable (he gets grumpy when he spends all day in the house with just Mummy, I have to take him to the shop or the hospital so he can see people!)

Jim Allen has just finished a spiritual retreat time with missionaries in Shell. Everything we do should make God look Good... pray that that is true of all we do here in the Ecuadorian Jungle with water projects.

Have a great month, keep in touch!
Alex, Alfredo and Benjamin

Photos from the beach

Grumpy Benjamin
Christmas Day in Machala with some of the Bermudez
Josue, Benjamin and Alfredo on the beach

praise and prayers january

Dear friends,

Happy New Year!
Thank you for all the Christmas cards sent… we have been receiving them before February, an improvement on last year! We spent the Christmas period traveling around the country to visit various family… Guayaquil, Machala and Quito. Benjamin got to dabble his toes in the Pacific Ocean and is now accustomed to only being held in arms as Alfredo’s family wouldn’t put him down (bad news for me!).

Praise:
Taisha local government agreed to the increase in prices for the last projects, so we didn’t lose money.

Benjamin is putting on weight and growing tall… and the family have finally accepted that he is a tall skinny baby not short and chubby so have reduced the pestering to feed him more

For a wonderful Christmas time with family and chance to relax.

Prayers:

The tank is still not in Amazonas! It has now been moved to the military base and we thought it was going to be flow in at the end of December but one of the motors on the helicopter broke and they had to cancel. The deadline for the project is 15th February so it needs to be moved this month!

Alfredo took on two additional projects and deadlines are next month. He is learning the hard way about project management and I cannot help as much as I’d like because of Benjamin.

We are both planning to take another Wheaton college course for credit next month. The theme is Folk religions and it looks very relevant to the work we do with the Shuar tribe, but the reading is only in English so is hard work for Alfredo and Alex has to fit in reading and studying (and attending classes in feb) around Benjamin.

Financial crisis… The Ecuadorian government have made many grand promises based on the high oil price that they cannot sustain now and there have been rumours of a banking crisis again (the last was in 1999 and left main people ruined) which will also affect our money! Pray for wise governance.

Thank you for keeping us lifted up in prayer. Let us know if you are interested in coming to visit our work in Shell this year (maybe even organize a work team with your church?)

Blessing,
Alex, Alfredo and Benjamin Leon

Atheist sees need for God

here is an interesting artictle written by a secular british journalist. Thanks Pat for sending it to me!

and why stop at Africa... I hope the Christian influence in our development work in Ecuador is equally as noticeable and vital as Perris found in Africa.

yes, even the Rocks (= hardheads) will end up to praise Him...

From The Times

December 27, 2008
As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God
Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset

Matthew Parris

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.

We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.

Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.