Joseph's Well at the End of the Earth.

We spent the last four days in the mountain jungles of Andra Pradesh. We visited two villages. I preached in one village and four said they wanted to be baptized. Two of them were the parents of one of the cooks at the Gootam's house. She is Eighteen and her name is Chinni. She is the girl in the lavender between Ricky and me. She has become a good friend to us so we were happy to go visit her village and look at her old stomping grounds...I can just imagine a littler Chinni running around playing there. We are especially happy that her parents decided to become Christians. Next to Ricky is Joseph the super preacher. He was baptized 10 years ago and he has baptized about 25,750 people. He joyfully goes where most preachers think is too far, or unreachable. He used to walk to all these villages (about 150) but then Ricky's family bought him a bicycle. Then later they gave him an old motorcycle, which he takes everywhere. It is old and starts to shake when he gets to 45-50m/hr along with other problems, so we want to try and raise money for a newer motorcycle for him. He preaches to very poor people in the tribal villages who can only afford to give 1 rupee (10 rupees=25 cents). He gives so much of himself so we want to try and help him out. We got to hang out with him one night without an interpreter which was fun. We seemed to communicate even without knowing a common language. He calls us his brother and sister, and has taught us what real Christian brotherhood is.
took us to another village called Bakuluru where we started to dig a well. We stayed in a hotel in Narsiputnam while we worked on the well. It took 3 hours to get there each day and we worked for five hours or so and drove three hours back. We wanted to stay there overnight to work longer but Ricky said it was better to stay in the hotel. Our fearless translator Niranjan did stay in the village overnight. He was supposed to ride the bus to the hotel, but because of the rains the bus never came. So he had to walk 4km back to the village. The next morning he tried again, and again the bus didn't come so he had to walk to the next village to be picked up. It rained every day we were there. The last day we had to re-design one of the digging tools because it was not working very well. Our hole was too wide and we only dug 8 feet in two days. Had we dug a smaller diameter I think we could be at 30 ft instead. Please pray for this church that they don't get discouraged, because they say the water is 140 ft. down, also they are getting ridiculed by the other villagers. Starting to dig the well was like Nehemiah trying to rebuild the wall. We didn't get that discouraged because we couldn't understand what they were saying, but it must have been harder for the few that tried to help. We just understood that they were making fun of us, but we tried to stay light hearted about it. Two women decided to help us the last day, and a preacher from another village, which was encouraging. We sang some songs in English and they would sing some in Telegu. One of the women was laughing a lot and seemed to be a bit onery, which made it fun. Joseph guided the drill bit and bailer, but I think he was doing more than he had to, and took some of the weight on himself.