An Update From the Field

John Sender will be one of my teammates/ leaders while working on the many different water/construction projects in South Sudan. He just recently arrived in Mundri , South Sudan and has been appointed to serve there for the next 3 years. Below is a quick synopsis of the conditions in Mundri that John recently posted in his blog.

"It did not take long to realize the incredible needs for basic things people face from day to day here. As the bishop of Mundri put it in a fellowship dinner my team and some church leaders had last week, nicknamed a swallowship meeting by Repent, a pastor and vice-principle of the theological college we work with here, "Though we have independence here now, 'we are not out of the woods yet". Today I visited an area set aside for returnees coming from Ethiopia, northern Sudan, Uganda, and other countries. It was hard to sit down and listen to them sharing their needs. They said they had little in the way of food, seeds for beginning to develop agriculture, and the land they have been given to settle in has no access to water. Women and children travel anywhere from 1-3 miles to collect water, multiple times a day. What is really heartbreaking is that the place they get water from was to be a larger water project with lots of capacity for supplying water to many people (2 large water storage tanks atop a steel tower) but there was a semi-collapse of one of the towers just as the project opened for service, and one of the tanks broke beyond repair. The other sits on the ground now and the water flows freely from the pump. With no long term plan for fixing the system, and the NGO installing it leaving the area some time ago, the people there have come to accept that this is just their situation. Please pray as I work with my boss Michael Masso to develop a plan for solving this problem over the next days."

I am still at 40% of my goal for leaving to go to South Sudan on October 21st of this year! If you or anyone you know would like to donate to my cause, please email me at grantcurtiss@gmail.com so that I can contact with more information or just donate at http://www.whm.org/give/missionary?ID=21711.

Much love,

Grant Curtiss