Water Truck Repair Update
Hope Rising Together (formerly Let Them LOL)
This past May, Hope Rising Together awoke to bad news. A devastating car crash tore apart our primary vehicle in Sierra Leone. Despite the severity, thankfully all of our staff were okay, but the truck was totaled. This vehicle has helped drill more than 150 wells, providing water for over 50,000 people. It’s been our source for servicing and maintaining each well four times a year through extremely rough terrain. It has helped repair and revitalize other broken wells we come across in villages, provided emergency support to our medical team, and transported supplies to remote villages where our malnutrition program operates. Needless to say, we needed a replacement immediately. The cost was $40,000 . . . and we didn’t have it.
Colossians 3:12 hits a nerve as it highlights the stunning paradox of nonprofit and ministry work. The word compassion means we are called to suffer with, and as we do, we put on display the very hope we proclaim. This root of the word compassion comes alive as “beside, near, together with” each other as we choose to “endure, experience” and bear a range of each other’s burdens as our own*. When God’s people are clothed in compassion, the weight of suffering becomes a shared thing, planting the very seeds needed to blossom into a display of God’s abundant provision. We experience this in Christ, then we get to become cultivators of it ourselves.
When the vehicle our program most relied upon was destroyed beyond repair, we reached out to you - our community - and humbly watched God respond through His people. Generous donors like you chose to share the burden, and as each person offered what they could, we inched toward our goal. As we neared completion, The Chapel stepped in to help us close the gap, and as you’re reading this now our new vehicle should be arriving to the import process in Sierra Leone! We’re full of gratitude toward so many of you who continue to decide the burdens of our neighbors near and far are better shared, alongside Hope Rising. It’s a privilege to behold something so uniquely beautiful - a garden of true compassion rising out of remnants and ruins - reaching into and through our hometown and around the world.
Hope Rising Together (formerly Let Them LOL) exists to empower communities in Buffalo and Sierra Leone through sustainable development including clean water, education, childcare, healthcare, nutrition, agriculture, and leadership training.
*https://www.etymonline.com/word/compassion
