A first-ever “vision trip” organised by Covenant World Relief and Development (CWRD), the relief and development arm of the Evangelical Covenant Church in the United States, took a group of Covenant members to the mountains of Lempira, Honduras, this summer to see the work of a long-standing local partner. The visit centred on COCEPRADIL, an organisation founded in 1989 as an association of village water committees that now also works on food security, nutrition and animal husbandry. Writing afterwards, participant Jane Chao Pomeroy described a village where roughly 500 people — about 50 families — now have running water in their homes, four years after a system drawing on a deep underground well was completed. One man told the visitors he had lived 79 years without it.
CWRD is best known among Covenant congregations for disaster relief, and in recent years it has added long-term development work; the trip was designed to let members witness what partner organisations actually do and carry those stories back to their churches. COCEPRADIL’s method, as Pomeroy describes it, is to begin with what a community already has rather than arriving as its sole provider. CWRD director Nils Clauson opened the week with Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand, noting that the loaves and fish came not from the disciples but from a boy in the crowd — the same logic, he suggested, by which the Honduran partner works.
The practical demands are considerable. A minimum share of families in each village must commit before a project can move forward, households whose homes sit above a water source have to give up land their families have held for generations, and families pay for the meters installed outside their doors and dig their own trenches for septic tanks. In one village a contractor tried twice and failed to cut trenches on ground that was too steep, and the village’s men dug them by hand. The nearest airport is eight hours away and the roads are unpaved. Once a system is running, every family tracks its own use on its meter, and COCEPRADIL helps each community form a leadership team, holding annual meetings at which reports are given and decisions put to a vote. The organisation holds the water rights and could profit from them, Pomeroy notes, but the fees are returned to the communities instead. Villagers showed visitors their vegetable gardens and explained how they now keep chickens and pigs fenced rather than loose at the door — evidence, she wrote, of people taking care to steward what they had received.
Source: Evangelical Covenant Church / Covenant World Relief and Development — covchurch.org
