RECONNECT CHRISTMAS

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Updates!

Greetings from Kigoma,

I wanted to share some pictures with you of the progress on the Community Center building.

We had to stop construction for two weeks as a medical team was out from Texas to run a free clinic for the poor. We converted the computer school into a clinic and over 1,500 people were treated. As you can imagine, it was all consuming.

Many were seriously ill. We lost some few patients but hundreds have experienced healing in both body and spirit. We had over 40 people working in the clinic — including a team of four pastors who visited with and prayed for patients. Kigoma has never seen anything like this before, and so many have been blessed and deeply touched by the Christian love shown to them. This was one of those great experiences in life that I will never forget.

So many exciting things are going on right now. A missionary from Texas has volunteered to put in two water wells for our ministry. Since we have been without city water for 5 months, this was really exciting. We had 12 women carrying the water for the construction of the ministry center in 5 gallon buckets on their heads from Lake Tanganyika to the site. They could hardly keep up the with need for water to make cement and mortar. After weeks of drilling we got the well down 214 feet. We hit lots of good clean water. With the new pump installed, we now have water for construction and hopefully, for years ahead for the entire ministry site. The well at the community center is finished and he moved his drilling rig to our house — about a block away. Today he hit water again at our house and we now have water for our residence, too. The value of each well, if we had paid to have them drilled, would be $25,000 each – with no guarantee of water.

The Community Center is now back under construction. The two attached pictures are as follows:

Women's Restroom

Women's Restroom

The drain plumbing has been installed in the building. This picture is of the women’s restroom. The Millers, a mechanical engineer and his wife, came out and worked for six weeks to help with this work and Terry Miller did design modifications and drawings and then installed the plumbing.
Library View

View From The Kitchen

This picture is taken from inside the kitchen overlooking the main room (toward the library and radio studio). We had to fill the building in with dirt and we are watering the dirt everyday to help it pack down tight before we pour the floor. The metal, tower-like structures are the rebar for concrete reinforced pillars.

New Utility Building

New Utility Building

This picture is of the new utility building that is also being built (right next to the community center building) in support of the community center and the whole ministry site. In the foreground is the new well. The next square where the fellow is putting down stones will be the water tank. Additional rooms include showers (if we use the community center to sleep a work team), generator room, store rooms, and laundry. The tower in the background is one section of our home-made radio tower (made from water pipe).
New Community Center

New Community Center

Here is another shot of the community center building. We are starting to install the windows and door frames. The bricks are piled up so we can continue putting the wall up as soon as the doors and windows are set. Once we reach the top of the doors, a reinforced concrete “ring beam” will be poured all the way around the building. It will be the first of three such ring beams used in this building.

All work is being done by hand and there is no heavy equipment being used. It takes time but the result will be great.

Thanks again to all our brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus at Wheatland Salem for the sacrifice made at Christmas to make this all happen. We guarantee the construction work on this building for 100 years!

Blessings to all,
Lowell

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Kigoma Community Center 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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An Update On Kigoma, April 2010

Here is an update on the community center.
We have spent some time designing and constructing the stairs to the radio/recording studio.  This is a Lowell Wertz design.  We built the pillar of Hercules, 20 inch square, rebar reinforced column,  then a metal platform landing for outside the second story door, then a metal beam made [...]

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