Liz and Kim tended to 4 members recovering from a brief bout of illness while Kristen tended to the work team at the work site. Around 11:00am Pastor May, Kim and Liz left for a meeting with a British nonprofit organization called WaterAid. Their mission is to provide safe clean drinking water to parts of the world where it isn’t available. We were continuing the work started by Judy Stroeh of Messiah Lutheran Church in Cincy.
With their blue bucket briefcase in hand, Liz and Kim experienced first hand what Erin Brockovich must have encountered, but with much less resistance. Little did we know, we would be stepping into a high level meeting looking pretty grumpy in our long skirt, no makeup, dirty sock, bucket carrying, and ponytail wearing natural selves.

We started with a meeting at the water aide office where they were kind enough to speak English for us. We were even given a "God Bless You" by one of the executives at this meeting, a reverends daughter. Coming from a somewhat secular approach of providing social care, this was a positive sign.

From there we were driven to a government office for a meeting seeking permission to use the product we were presenting...PUR (made by P&G in Cincy). We were surprised to see the meeting run by a woman. Her title was Directoress and was second in command to the minister of Water/Sanitation of Burkina Faso. Pastor May had 10 min to resent the product and was given no warning this was expected. He presented the info very professionally and had support from an IT guy...another surprise to us. His info was well received and we even left our blue bucket briefcase to assist them in trying the product firsthand. We will miss our blue bucket briefcase, which so fashionably matched our frumpy attire. We hope we did Judy proud.

Au Revoir from Africa

Your missionaries in Burkina Faso.  Pastor and Kim Schave, Paul and Emily Tomes, Kristen and Joe Fields, Liz Huff, Pastor Bob Greene, Pastor J. May, Tom Ritter