About 1,000 adult volunteers, national employees, translators, support personnel, and their children are in PNG at any given time for Bible translation and related projects. Fifty national translation workers can be trained at a time at the Center in Ukarumpa.
“The sense of desperation, of frustration, when you don’t have access to water . . . it’s something [Americans] almost never experience,” says Bruce Smith, president and CEO of Wycliffe Associates. “The Bible translation personnel at Ukarumpa live with the threat of this situation every single day. This shouldn’t be.” The current system brings up to 65,000 gallons of water per day from a stream outside the Translation Center compound. However, last year the owner of the land where the pipes enter the stream, hired armed guards to prevent workers from fixing damaged pipes at the stream, leaving the compound without water for plumbing and the basic necessities of life. It was only through police intervention that the Center could resume piping from the stream. Unfortunately, the land where the stream is located cannot be purchased. As a result, Wycliffe Associates has been raising funds and sending volunteers to work alongside nationals to install a new, more modern system to provide a reliable water supply for the Translation Center property.
The new system will draw up to 80,000 gallons of water per day from two sources within the center, ensuring an uninterrupted supply, and will bring water into new storage tanks. Wycliffe Associates also anticipates water loss to go down dramatically when the system’s leaky, 50-year-old pipes are replaced.
Funds raised by Wycliffe Associates will be used to create access roads for construction equipment, dig interceptor trenches, dig and line sump and surge tanks, measure production rates from the tanks, and modify existing security fencing. An additional $100,000 needs to be raised to finish the work before the rainy season starts in December.
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