Their Agenda

In country I tend to lose track of the actual days of the week. The days left of work trump the whether it is Monday or Saturday. However, Sunday ends up being slightly different as much of the community is busy throughout the day. This granted the team to take greater responsibility for part of the day, but limits the sum of meaningful work.

My job today was mainly laying pipe for the principal line. This is pretty much exactly what you would expect: a few of us walk behind the locals who already cut the trenches and then lay PVC pipe within them. We must find the correct pipe size, carry it to the location, string it out along the trench, glue it together, and then lay it in the trench.

A few of us spent most of the day on this activity. We were working on the East distribution line, which is cut into a steep hillside. We probably carried, assembled, and glued about seventy pipes, which at six meters each equals a little under a quarter of a mile. It turns into a pretty monotonous activity of correcting pipe, applying the glue, and forcing it together—all under the beating sun.

While the work was tiring, it was difficult to miss the peace and beauty that comes along with it. Sitting on a hillside overlooking the beautiful valley is a view that I would travel miles for back in comfortable Nashville. How easy it is to become so preoccupied with our work that we miss this natural beauty, or the joy of Mariano who followed us around and tried to hoist the 6m pipes around the mountainside. Water is critical, but it means nothing without the inherent beauty that it feeds.

The nine-year-old boy that I just mentioned, Mariano, was a fantastic understudy. After watching us for one or two minutes, he realized that the pipes were oriented backwards, they need to be disconnected for us to glue them, and we need to clean the fittings. He quickly ran ahead of us and started working to prepare the pipes for our arrival. Long after his disappearance, we found each pipe set up for our arrival and the fittings clean.

Once we arrived to houses, we quickly attracted a group of community members who became almost overly helpful. Within a few minutes they had taken my job and would have done it all themselves if we had handed them the glue. Not only could they have easily done our job, but they would have done it better.

I am not ashamed that the Mayans could do this better than us. They can do plenty of things better than us. In fact, they could do almost everything that we are here to do better than us including cutting the trenches, laying pipe, assembling spigots, or marking the lines. That brings up two interesting points: the point of our participation in this project and the value of vulnerable service.

You might think that it’s natural that the engineering team isn’t as good at the work, we bring the designs and they help with the labor. However, the interesting point is that most of this system was designed by a Mayan firm based on Coban, Guatemala. Our host partner, ADICAY, is really good at water projects. So good, in fact, that I often feel like we are learning as much from them as we are adding in technical knowledge. This is not to say that we can’t add value as engineers, or perhaps design a better system, but it is to say that it is not where we could add the most value. As an engineering missions center, we have a ways to go to figure out our role in these types of projects moving forward.

Intended or not, I have found a happy consequence of our participation in this trip to be that we get to serve the community. Of course, we are on a mission trip: the implicit point is to not only serve God but to serve this community. However, we typically serve from a place of authority. We come as doctors to use our expertise to heal the sick; we come as engineers to use our expertise to build something; we come as builders to use our free-time and money to construct a house. Each of these actions is valuable, but ultimately they build out of expertise, privilege, and authority to serve down to the community.

In a sense, we are serving out of authority this week. We are staying in an electrified house, with ample food, and secured accommodations; however, as I follow a Mayan laying pipe I follow his instructions and learn from him. I get the chance to work on this community’s project. In some ways, I am simply another pair of hands. I can be vulnerable to follow ADICAY, to serve up to this community.

To be clear, adding value from our God-given skills and education is not a bad thing. In fact, in terms of final impact, using those skills brings about a seemingly higher good. However, I think there should also be a place to truly serve rather than the plan the service. Instead of creating the agenda, we can find specific ways to fit into theirs.

#engineering #humanitarian #peugeotcenter #lipscomb