When my husband John was younger, he hated hardware stores. (Work with me here.) He hated all the hooks sticking out of the walls to hang things on. To him, it felt like those hooks were headed straight for his eyes. It was an odd weakness that followed him to adulthood.
Yet years later, as we lived in a remote village in Ethiopia where John was working on a water project, he began having trouble with his eyes–a malady seeming particularly unfortunate following a lifetime vulnerability.
Our family had been in Ethiopia for about two weeks one February when we decided to visit the village where we’d soon be living.
My husband John is a water engineer. Our task was to put in a water system for the Tokay area and surrounding villages. We had just begun language school in Addis, so our skills were limited–but we were excited to see the village where we’d live for the next three years, about four hours west.
Sometimes meeting basic needs in missions–food, medicine, shelter–extends to more than what we could ever anticipate.
This story comes to us from Ethiopia, a locale where veterinary medicine (including basic control of parasites) saves lives–and not only through the obvious impacts of improved nutrition and disease treatment.