Clean water—it’s a basic need and, therefore, one of the most distressing problems in the Majority World. We’ve all heard the stories: girls who ought to be in school spend hours a day carrying jerry cans for miles to fetch muddy water from pathetic looking streams. What we rarely realize is that those girls often have to walk right past once-abundant water sources along the way. Many water points around the world were installed by compassionate outsiders. Over the years, they’ve gotten broken, dirty, overgrown and, finally, abandoned. The problem is, the outsiders expected the community to take ownership and care for the resource they were given. The community, on the other hand, was left disappointed because the people who built the well never maintained it.

Rubongi was one community in Uganda that faced this situation. But the church in Rubongi participates in Truth Centered Transformation training, and came to realize that, by restoring the well, they could show God’s love to their community and solve their water problem without waiting for outsiders to help. They scooped mud out of the abandoned well, cut back the brush and grass that had overgrown it, and got the water flowing again. Even the non-Christians in the community are now praising God for clean water.