5Crawfords

A couple of the nearby village kids who delivered our food supplies each day. It's always amazing and humbling when the local kids help out in hosting the EMI teams. The kids love interacting with Westerners and the team is always so blessed to talk and play with the local children. Monday, January 31 Today was our first real work day. I think everyone was a little anxious to get to it, so after morning devotions and breakfast, the team split up into their various disciplines and went to work. The civil engineers split up – two of them took the hand auger out to dig bore holes for the percolation tests (these are the tests we use to figure out how well the soil will disperse the wastewater), and the other two went down the road to test the closest water sources, which happened to be the well at the church we visited yesterday and a nearby neighbor’s well. The architects got back to work on the master plan and drainage plans. We got a great look at how things are currently draining...

Looking down on part of the site from our work room. The pit latrine and showers that we all used during the week are seen in the middle distance (small grey buliding with red roof). Part I of III Travel – January 27-28 For some reason, leaving this time was especially hard. I should look back at previous blogs to see if I’ve said that before! Part of the reason I think it was hard this time was because of how it went down. Since my flight wasn’t until late in the afternoon (5:20pm), I had much of the day to kill before leaving for the airport. So I decided to go to the school to say goodbye to Alisha and the boys. Well, I think that was a mistake as it made me sad to see them in their school environment and realize that I really knew little about their normal school day (since I never see them there). Then seeing them get choked up saying goodbye to me was really hard too. In the end, Alisha walked me to my car and I drove off a blubbering mess! I decided that the best remedy for thi...

On Thursday evening at 5:20pm, I will be flying out of Denver bound for Uganda (via the UK). I'm leading a team of 10 design professionals from all over the country (Colorado, North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin) and even one intern from Northern Ireland. We will be working 15 km outside of Kampala on the Gaba Bible Institute project Master Planning a Bible college on their new site. A surveyor from British Columbia has already been on site surveying so we have a jump start on the design. We'll spend 8 nights on site gathering information, performing tests on the soil and water and learning all about the ministry so we can help them plan for the future development of their site. I'm really excited to be going back to Uganda, and will spend some time in our East Africa office and visit with friends for a few days after the project trip is done. You can pray for our team's safe travel, unity, good decision-making, and most of all that we can be a blessing to the ...

In our Ducks' gear, at kickoff time for the big game. The Ducks didn't win, but it was a great game and we had our chances. We can't wait until September 3 - the next Ducks' game! This past week, we have had a 'staff week' around the office. Each day, we've spent half of the day in worship, prayer and other bonding and team-building activities. It's really been a great time to connect with the other staff here - something that happens much less naturally than in the East Africa office. Why that's the case is not for any single reason, but for a number of factors that serve to make connecting as a staff here more difficult: Geography - we all live many miles apart since Colorado Springs is a large, sprawling city Cultural - working in an office in the US is naturally much more formal than in Uganda Situational - everyone has their own lives here, with many having family and friends surrounding them (as opposed to life in Uganda, where we were all stri...

Being a part of the ministry of eMi back in Colorado Springs has been both a challenging and eye-opening experience. I have to say, God knew what He was doing. The more we learn, the more excited we are about the impact eMi has on people and ministries around the world. Last week, we had a guest speaker during our morning prayer time – a former client-ministry director from India who is visiting the US right now. She shared how the design report eMi did for her orphanage ministry 6 years ago has been a huge part of her sustaining an onslaught of persecution from the government as it has cracked down severely on Christian ministries in the past year. Because they had our project report, including a master plan with extensive plans and specific details of their plans for their site, the government has been unable to shut them down. And when the government tried to steal land from her by providing a false survey of her land that made it look much smaller, she was able to prove that it was...

The Samfya Bible School Master Plan and project report is almost complete! Well, the last few weeks aren’t the most glamorous part of my job here with eMi, but they are amongst the most important as we’re in the process of finalizing our design report for the Zambia trip. Between the volunteers, interns and myself, we’ve spent over 1800 hours working on this project so far, and it all comes down to these last weeks before the intern semester ends. So, while the project trip makes for more exciting and interesting blog posts, as is the case with so many things in life, the real nuts and bolts of the work we’re doing for the ministry takes place back here in the office. We have been finalizing plans, sending things out to the volunteers and the ministry for review and comment, and now we are incorporating all of those comments and making the final changes to finish the report. We’re really excited about this project and how our design ended up, and are especially excited that the ministr...