Dry-erase Boards: A Love Story

The past several years have seen some remarkable improvements in technology, especially in the area of communication.  The fact that I can sit at a computer and talk to people anywhere in the world for free by way of Skype, all from a place that's an hour from the nearest electrical service, is amazing to me.  Think about it - cell phones, iPhones, the internet, satellites, GPS, and countless other devices are all so commonplace that we barely even notice them, except for maybe when watching re-runs of TV shows from the 1990s and notice that most of their issues could have been solved by mobile phones.  None of these inventions, however, can even approach the importance of the dry-erase board and the contributions it has made to humankind.

I know there are some old-fashioned chalkboard apologists out there, and to those people I just have to say that all you are is chalkdust in the wind.  Dry-erase boards use markers that, while not quite as tasty as chalk, come in a wide variety of bright colors as diverse as "green" and "blue", and for extra emphasis when underlining something important, even "red".  Black dry-erase markers are so 2005.   Go to any office building and inspect the dry erase boards in individual offices - that's how you can tell who is the brains of the outfit and who does all the work.  I used to work with a man (and friend) named George Garden, whose marker board was epic.  It was always full of engineering formulas and complicated things like "process and instrumentation diagrams" and other things that looked like the washing instructions you find on the tag of your shirt.  And for any of you who drink water in Brentwood Tennessee, rest assured that the only reason that water ever got to your house was because there was a note on Travis Lankford's dry-erase board to build something or fix something or "ignore what that geeky engineer down the hall just said".

So what, one might ask, does this have to do with mission work in Guatemala?

Our work here has gotten busy enough that we now use a white marker board in our planning and designing so much that even men like George and Travis would be impressed.  Here is a photo I took a couple of days ago after a minutes-long planning session:

Aside from noticing that I don't know how to turn the flash off on my camera, you'll notice there are references on here to water projects in places like:

• Sesalche I, where people don't have water 3 months out of the year because their source goes dry and for whom we are building a reservoir and extra lines to augment their system
• Sesalche II, where the 800 people there obtain water every day from the same location where they wash their clothes and themselves, and where not surprisingly there are high rates of sickness
• Sequixpur, where 400 people drink out of a river when we can get safe water much closer to their houses than the polluted river for about $10 a person.
• Benitzul, where we live and where many people, especially on one end of the village, still have to look for water.
• Don Bosco Setex, where we've designed a new spring box for them that will double their supply and are looking to construct later this month.
• Semesche, where a very simple project can get water to about 200 people.
• Santo Tomas, where someone built part of a system 12 years ago and never taught them how to maintain it, so it hasn't worked since.

It's wonderful and humbling that we are getting so busy with what we are doing.  Water isn't the answer to the problems in these communities, but it's a start.  It really helps, when dealing with the 17 communities here, to accomplish something with water or bridges or other things along those lines, because it seems that they are much more receptive to what we say about health or education.  I think that's maybe the point of Jesus's conversation with Nicodemus - that if people can't trust us with what we do and say about earthly things, they're not very likely to trust anything we say about heavenly things either.  And there's a part of me that truly believes, through some supernatural occurrence, that Jesus used a dry erase board when trying to explain it all to Nicodemus.  Maybe a dry-erase scroll.