Projects Status Update

All Collaboratory teams preparing for service discuss the importance of humility. Individual team members are invited to the team, each other, so that the team may collectively serve others. Those who lead are asked to be first in readiness to take on humble but necessary tasks. Perhaps the mobility project team was thinking of this when they asked me to paint tricycle frames. I was ready, and gladly dug my pre-stained but clean painting clothes from the suitcase. I like painting. It allows me to make a very small but visible contribution to the excellent work of this team, and I always end up with patches of paint, fire engine red this year, that I get to wear like badges of honor on my clothes, hands, and wherever else the paint decides to go.

It is very encouraging to see the bent frame design introduced two years ago flourishing in the community, and the new chain tensioners. This year’s new universal frame further reduces the number of costly welds required to build a tricycle, and enables local fabricators to master one frame and make both hand and electric powered tricycles. A new welding fixture is also contributing beautifully to quality assurance, assuring a well aligned frame every time. This afternoon I painted a second frame, and I understand two more are in the pipeline.

Although the systems and form design of the tricycles are nearing completion, there is still much important work to be done. We still do not have a reliable local supplier of square metal tubing, or an alternative a means of accommodating variability in tube wall thickness. There are also still too many mechanical failures too early in the life of a tricycle. A new double-rim wheel design, and more quality control during wheel fabrication, should increase the lifespan of wheels; but we have discovered that the splines are wearing too quickly in the sun gear of a planetary gear system that is the heart of the transmission.

We are pleased with progress so far this year, but success will come when persons with disabilities are mobilized all over Burkina Faso. The Collaboratory does not aim to provide all these tricycles. Rather, with our Burkinabe and SIM friends, we are creating and refining a design that local people can build, and that local businesses can get behind because the design is self-sustaining in the local economy. This takes time. I am reminded that the most reliable and relatively (in the N. American economy) affordable automobiles that serve many today are the result of years of incremental, mostly unglamorous, but steady improvement. Praise God for the generations of Messiah College students, past, present, and yet to come, who have shaped and believed in a Kingdom vision for the mobility project, and sustained it with their labor.

When I am not managing team logistics or leading our class discussions I share the task of team photographer with Justin. I can’t say this is a humble task because I enjoy it too much, but it is work that his enabled me to serve the Center for the Advancement for the Handicapped by growing their portfolio of images that tell their story, and to do the same for our team. I have especially enjoyed visiting the Bethany and Katie’s classroom and the Burkina Summer Enrichment Program (BSEP) with my camera. BSEP is a project of the Education Group of the Collaboratory, whose work is to promote literacy and the development of abstract thinking skills among children and families in communities where lack of education is an issue of justice. This summer they are nurturing math and language literacy skills in an integrated classroom where more than half of the students are either blind or deaf. Bethany brings strong French language skills, and Katie is a capable communicator in sign language.

Jon and Matt (former Collaboratory member and a principle contact for us with SIM) enjoyed success yesterday in beaming wireless internet from the mission station to the Center for the Advancement of the Handicapped. This was the work of West Shore Evangelical Free Church in Mechanicsburg, PA. The West Shore team included Collaboratory advisors Steve Frank and Harold Underwood. It was satisfying to make a very small but important contribution to this project, and to think about how internet access will help the administration and educational work of the Center. At prayer meeting tonight we learned there was a successful Skype call from the Center!

Mike continues his research into bio-diesel production as a potential opportunity for job creation and to keep more of the money spent on fuel in the local economy. Tomorrow he hopes to experiment with an oil press. He has also served a team video man, capturing and archiving important documentation footage for the mobility and BSEP projects.

I am deeply grateful to God, the people of Mahadaga, Burkina Faso, this team, to all the people in the Collaboratory who have worked on our projects and helped send the team, and to the many friends who are praying for us and who supported us financially. Thank you all for the gift of the opportunity to serve in Burkina Faso this summer. We are here to bring the Good News about Jesus in word and deed. This blog post has focused on good news about our projects. There is much to be celebrated. Looking ahead, however, in my third and final blog post next week I will share how helping is not easy. We stumble, and learn that good intentions are not enough. This too is part of our story.

Among the readings and discussions undertaken by the team are several chapters from the book, “When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself,” by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert. Steve and Brian do a great job of capturing a number of the core instructions we give to Collaboratory teams, one being that true service is something done with others, not to them, for mutual benefit. Such service requires deep humility: a readiness to receive as well as give, to seek out the wisdom of the local community, and to begin to work by discovering the good that God is already doing in a place. Help given in ignorance and without relationship can and often does do more harm than good.

When I write next week I will reflect on what we have learned about helping without hurting. Until then, I encourage you to think about these questions: What is poverty, and who are the poor? Is poverty the absence of material wealth, or is it something else? Do those of us who are materially wealthy carry other burdens of poverty?

Again, thank you for praying for us. Please pray that we would grow in faith and obedience to Christ, and that we would serve well. Please also pray for Angela Hare, advisor to the Education Group and BSEP, as she travels to us. Angela showed up for the bus ride to Mahadaga this morning only to learn that it was canceled. “Come back tomorrow,” she was told. We love Dr. Hare. She also has cheese and chocolate with her!

Blessings in Christ,
David