Water engineer Lizzie White uses her skills to share the gospel while addressing challenges faced by least-reached communities in Peru.
What made you choose to serve God in Peru?
After various short-term experiences in South America – starting from when I was about 18 that helped me learn the language and culture – I was looking for long-term placements with a Christian charity and wanted something to do with water because that was the experience and training I’d built up.
I had two feasible options and one was a Peruvian NGO that’s existed for 20-odd years called AIDIA, which is made up of the main three evangelical churches in the city.
Interdenominational work is rare and valuable in Peru and it’s miraculous that it still exists, so I was inspired by the chance to work with such a great ministry. I really loved seeing its community development work in action, including Bible translation, church support, and church planting, and to realise how this growing ministry is reaching out to rural communities.
How are you serving with SIM?
I’m based in Abancay, in the heart of the Andes and I arrived 11 years ago to help AIDIA set up its first rural water project to improve drinking water. (Parasites that lurk in unsafe drinking water cause a range of complaints, including anaemia, malnourishment, and stomach upsets).
I worked alongside AIDIA for the first few years, and the water ministry has now become an SIM project and is managed by Noemi, one of AIDIA’s employees. Last year, when I was in the UK for my home assignment, Noemi ran the water projects for nine months, which is brilliant!
We’d been praying for this for many years because it means we can visit even more areas and the Peruvian Christians I train up, will eventually be able to take over the work.
This is the longest I’ve lived and worked in a single place, so thanks to the benefits of building relationships with families and gaining parents’ trust, I’m also involved in youth work, discipling teenagers who move from their village to work or study in the city.
I’m also the Personnel Coordinator for SIM Peru with lots of ongoing things like keeping policies and training and reviews up to date and trying to check in with all the different teams.
What does the water project involve?
We show people how to install simple water filters and train them in hygiene practices and how to store filtered water to ensure they can protect and properly maintain their water supplies.
As well as giving visible improvements in water quality, the project’s helped change attitudes towards the church as places that were often quite hostile to the church beforehand, see that we want to help.
Over the years, I’ve developed good contacts with the regional government, which is keen to prevent the health and economic difficulties created by poor water quality and sanitation, so we also teach water hygiene in schools and train district staff about the long-term benefits of water filters.
How do you share the gospel?
The water-related teaching has a clear, biblical, parallel, or example, which helps people to remember and understand both concepts. So, in Deuteronomy, there’s a teaching about basic sanitation that people are shocked to find is in the Bible, but they’re also amazed that God’s interested in all areas of their lives.
The ministry helps people become more accepting of the church and more open to the gospel. Also, after getting a water filter, part of the deal is villagers must let us come into their house to see how they’re using it and this slowly and slowly opens people up, which is really exciting.
How have you seen God working for your ministry?
In one village that was hostile to church, the father was the local plumber and so we’d make visits to the family home. Over time, the parents allowed their children to go to church events and then they started coming too and became believers!
What parts of mission work do you find the most rewarding?
Lots and lots of it is relationship-building, both within the church and within communities.
I love serving God here and seeing people grow, learn, and be able to put things into practice themselves; whether that’s the little extra things I do like helping to teach music at church and then seeing some of the teenagers I teach become part of the worship group on a Sunday; or watching our water ministry volunteers do the teaching themselves and tweak it with better examples and slightly more nuanced words to really make that connection.
What parts do you find the most challenging?
Travel! The villages are scattered around and quite remote, often high up in the mountains and although many have roads, the journey can take a couple of days. There’s a famous poem that describes this region as a crumpled-up piece of paper and its mountains and ravines make it extremely hard to travel.
The villages I visit are only about 100 kilometers, but it takes five or six hours to get there as it’s mostly a single track with lots of mining trucks going both ways.
How can we support or pray for you in your ministry?
The balance of the three roles!
We’re starting to try out expanding our water projects to other regions that Noemi will head up. Please pray for wisdom how that can go and how it needs to be slightly different and for me to support Noemi well.
There are several new people in the pipeline to join SIM Peru, so please pray for the team as we help them to prepare well and settle in once they arrive.
Please pray that God shows me the way forward with my youth ministry and for it to have an impact, especially on those teenagers already living in the city.