So often we never realize the impact we are making by a simple gift. I thought since this was the gift-giving season, I would tell you about a gift you unknowingly gave simply by donating to the ministries of Prakash for India.
A couple of weeks ago Andy—our pastor— spoke on Intervention Giving and Prevention Giving. Intervention giving is emotional and can be measured, while Prevention giving does neither. Intervention giving is much easier for fund raising. Loren and I looked at each other and realized that Prakash is a PREVENTION organization. We will never really know how many lives we saved from slavery, suicides due to no job skills, or marriages saved from a husband who beats his wife. Also how many health issues were prevented because Prakash taught great life skills and had filtered water for all the students and staff? For this we thank you.
Loren has continually been investigating ways to bring filtered water to villages where we have established ministry and social outreach. A year or so ago we took several rather expensive water filters and put them in three village areas. Only problem was they were too slow to give much relief to an entire village.
In October we took different kind filter, which claimed to have a capacity of 200 galleons a day and only needed a couple of plastic buckets, instead of the stainless steel containers of the previous filters. After one million, yes, one million galleons the filter will need to be replaced. This is WOW and double WOW!!!! Now if we can just convince the villagers to use them.
Also we have realized that the villagers must make some kind of investment in the project or there seems to be no real value to them. Totally free is not always a good thing. So we decided to make the recipients buy the required plastic bucket.
Now the matter of getting a family willing to try this new fandangle gadget, due to the fact, Indians are not readily accepting of change. It helped, even though sad, that the father in the family we chose had just experienced a bout of typhoid fever. Dr. Suresh took the filter to the tribal Banjara village. (This is the village where the widow lady received a cow and calf last year)
Dr. Suresh reports:
“I got phone call from Ishwar that his mother wanted to see me about her cow. Ishwar was just recovering from Typhoid so I decided to give them this very useful water filter. Before giving them this filter I explained to them about reasons for Typhoid, and when they realized its importance they could not express their happiness regarding filter.
There were some people watching this thing and requested Ishwar to let them have some filter water every day at least for their children and he promised happily. What a great joy for me to watch all these things and the way Jesus’ love spreading through Ishwar and his family in this village.”
Thank you for partnering with us in an immeasurable prevention ministry. Only when we get to heaven will we know the impact of Prakash for India.
