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Words from Gretchen Sept 1995

It’s Sunday night and I am trying to catch up but you know how that is so many times the more you do the more there is to do. Tomorrow is September 30th all the children, who are over 12, in the feeding program will have to leave after tomorrow. We were able to keep them on through the summer and frankly I do not know how many will find food. But the rules are no one over 12 can continue. We wanted to let them know we love them so we are going to give them parting gifts . Today we made up 60 bags for boys a bar of soap, toothpaste, a hat, a shirt and a basketball. We had a party for the girls and gave them about the same thing but mirrors and scarfs instead of basketballs, we also added some nice hair ribbons. The boys were just too ornery for a party but we wanted to give them something anyway.

Last week Zack went to Cabaret, a town about seven or eight miles from here. He was to drill a well for another missionary. On the third day he hit a real gusher and they had church right there. He was especially happy after going on all summer with drilling in several locations without much success. On Friday they finally went over the mountain to begin drilling for the feeding programs there. They worked a week welding a bumper and a tongue to put on the rig. They started around 7 a.m. to go up the first step steep part the but the truck spun out. The truck was an army vehicle with 10 wheels on it. They came back and loaded 50 sacks of wheat (that weighting 110 lb a bag) on it for weight and started again. He floored it and went up the steep area until he reached a flat area. They blew the horns got out and jumped around thanking God. They then proceeded for about a fourth of a mile and a tire blew out of the truck. They finally got to the location and drilled about 6 hours. There are over 1000 ft drop offs all the way up the mountain so the whole ordeal included at least some touch of a miracle.

Licia and I had an interesting day today. I got up at 4:30 to begin the day. Licia got up around 6 and we were at at the clinic by 7am. We saw and weighed over 180 children for nutrition clinic as well as food so the crowd was unruly at times. In the afternoon we had the class for the teenage girls. When that was finished we went to the feeding center where almost 400 children were waiting. We sang with them, served the meals and then gave all the children worm medications as they were leaving. We helped clean up and arrived home around 4:30. But before we could get into the house a man came running up the lane. He was saying a woman was having a baby down by the road. We gathered everything up and went down to get the blessing delivering a 7 lb 11 oz baby boy. The mom lived about 10 hours from here and was visiting family. She had walked to the public water spickets to get some water and went into labor. After that we had a quick dinner and I was in bed by 7:30 that night. I was a fairly typical day here for us.

Comment(1)

  1. Nancy Dillon says

    Love the stories from your Mom (yours as well!) Have you consider writing a book?

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