(Sept. 16, 2014 - by Ruth Pike)  Beneath the cool shade of the cocoa trees, the residents of Tetteh Akura in the West African country of Ghana would gather for community meetings with the water engineers.

The Reach Beyond engineering team often had something new to teach them. Yet the villagers also had their own surprises for the missionaries, whether it be an unexpected progress report on the water project, generous gifts of food such as cassava and plantains, or expressions of gratitude for the engineers.

“They were really a model community for us,” said missionary engineer Adeline McCartney, a member of the team based at Reach Beyond’s Sub-Saharan Africa Regional Office in Accra.

On Saturday, Aug. 9, eight months after their first survey visit to the remote community, missionaries and media partner Theovision joined with the people of Tetteh Akura for a dedication ceremony to celebrate the completion of their clean water well.

Thanks to their new borehole, funded by Reach Beyond-Canada, villagers will no longer have walk up a slope nearly half a mile to get water from a stagnant, murky water hole that they used for drinking, cooking and cleaning. Instead, they now have a clean water supply conveniently located in the middle of their community.

Since the team’s last visit, unbeknown to the Reach Beyond engineers, the community had built a fence around the well area to keep out animals, and they had constructed a bamboo shelter for the dedication ceremony. During the course of the project, villagers also acted on their own initiative to put stones around the well pump platform to prevent erosion, and they began building a communal pit latrine.

“They’re very motivated and seem to be taking ownership of the well and of their own sanitation situation, which is really encouraging,” said Reach Beyond engineer Laura Rescorla.

A highlight for the team was seeing members of the local WatSan (water and sanitation) committee help teach good hygiene practices to other villagers, passing on the principles they’d learned from training sessions led by Reach Beyond engineers.

One man in the community also wrote a song about hand washing—using hand motions to describe the technique—that he performed with his wife.

“They’d obviously gone home, and they’d really thought about this song,” said McCartney.

Yet the WatSan committee members weren’t satisfied with just teaching people from their own community about hygiene and sanitation. During a recent visit by Reach Beyond President Wayne Pederson and Sheila Leech, vice president of global healthcare, members of the committee stood up and explained the different topics that they had covered.

“Laura and I were thrilled that they remembered so much,” recounted Rescorla’s husband, Andrew, also an engineer. “Towards the end, the village chief stood up and explained how they must now share this knowledge with the surrounding communities, and if they don’t—if they keep it to themselves, it won’t have been worth it. We could not have written the script better ourselves.”

In addition to doing the well project and teaching sessions on hygiene and sanitation topics, Reach Beyond’s partner Theovision has begun a Bible Listening Club in the community. Members of the club meet every Sunday afternoon to listen to a portion of Scripture from an audio Bible in their own language and discuss the passage.

Audio Bibles are a particularly valuable resource as more than a quarter of the adults in Ghana are illiterate. Literacy rates are especially low among women.

“So they’re listening to the Word of God every week, national missionaries are [visiting], encouraging them and evangelizing them where they are,” explained McCartney. “The water project gives us the chance to spend a bit more time with the people and show them the practical side of God’s love.”

Although the water project is now complete, the Bible Listening Club will continue, and the Reach Beyond team hopes to maintain a relationship with the community.

“While the dedication marked the end of the water project, we hope it won’t mark the end of Theovision and Reach Beyond’s relationship with Tetteh Akura,” concluded Andrew Rescorla.

Sources: Reach Beyond, Theovision, UNICEF, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)