Living Water

INDIA – Brother Timothy works among the remote tribal people who live in the mountains of eastern Andhra Pradesh. This region is just south of Orissa, the Indian state that has been a hot spot of religious persecution in recent years. Things aren’t quite as desperate here as they are in Orissa—or in Uttarakhand, where a Living Water International drilling crew was driven out of a village a few weeks ago—but religious tension runs high.

Timothy, originally from a nearby city, came here several years ago and began to get a feel for the issues the people in the region were dealing with. The valleys are populated primarily with Hindu people—farmers and tradesmen who make a good living along the highway that snakes along from the coast to the interior. In the highlands, tribal people make their homes. They love these mountains, where they scrape out a living for themselves and their children, growing subsistence crops and making the long trek to the valley to sell handmade goods. A few among them are Christians, but most follow traditional tribal religions.

Timothy felt a tug in his heart to minister to the local tribespeople; he settled with his family in a central community near the foot of the highlands, where they planted a church. Visiting tribal villages on his motorcycle, he began to develop relationships, and began to share the good news about Jesus as opportunities came. People were responding well, and his church was growing. And then his work took an unexpected turn.

“When I came here, I came to preach and to start churches,” Timothy says. “But as I got to know these people I knew that I could not minister to their souls and ignore their physical condition. Their biggest problem was the dirty water. It was making them sick.”

Most of the tribal communities relied on stagnant ponds for their water; many had tried to dig wells by hand, but the rocky ground made it next to impossible. Villages at lower elevations might be able to get clean water from a good well, but villagers had to trek to the valley, wait until everyone else had gotten their water, and make the backbreaking climb back to the village with 40-pound water pots on their heads.

Through another local pastor, Timothy heard about an organization that drills water wells in communities across India, and walked to the next town to find a phone. That day, a call to Living Water International’s Hyderabad office set the wheels were set in motion to help Timothy’s villages.

It didn’t all happen at once, but today four tribal villages have deep wells that provide cold, clean water—all thanks to Timothy’s persistence. “Sickness is not so much a problem anymore,” Timothy says with a smile.

Another wells stands at Timothy’s church, on the edge of the valley. He is particularly happy that he can offer good water to the people who come to the church from distant communities.

“I want them to know that the water is good, but our God is even better,” says Timothy. He nods his head toward the words that are written in colorful script on the wall of the church, from Psalm 34:8: “Taste and see that the LORD is good.”