My husband grew up on a farm in Washington State.
He was driving tractors from an early age.
Pulling things apart, working out how they work and fixing stuff has always been his ‘thing’.
He studied construction management at college and first got passionate about working out practical and creative solutions to better the lives of people living in poverty when he visited Africa as a 20 year old.
I first met him in 2011 in Africa. I was on a short-term trip and he was building a school out in a remote village.
The isolation of the Refugee Camp, has made the most of Joshua’s broad skill set.
It is a place of extremes. Extreme heat and barrenness in the dry season and torrential rain and swamp land in the wet season.
Creative solutions are required to improve people’s daily living standards.
Joshua thrives working alongside the Mountain men and learning from them.
He also loves teaching them new building techniques and technologies that could improve their daily lives.
We have frequent visitors to our compound requesting help from Mr Joshua to fix things for them.
I often say ‘The camp is his dirt’… and dirty he gets!
Joshua has spent significant time researching, designing and building things with different recipes of dirt, termite mound, ash, sand, clay, and tree sap.His constructions are houses, ovens, fences, our latrine and our kitchen.
He has been determined to come up with a better housing solution for people here that utilizes only locally available resources.
This means concrete, stone, straight timber and steel are not an option.
And so he has to work with the dirt.
Creative Solutions: Water points
Each water point in the camp serves thousands of people their daily water rations.
At the end of 2016, as the UN were urging people to move from the camp to two of the neighboring refugee camps, they drastically cut the diesel supply to power the water pumps.
This meant some people were going thirsty if they didn’t get to the water point by 5am in the morning!
Working together with Samaritan’s Purse, Joshua was able to help solarize some of the water stations.
This decreased the need for diesel to power these pumps and utilized the camp’s most readily available resource – sunshine!
Creative solutions: Teaching engineering skills to schoolchildren
Josh has built a solar-powered trailer that works as a little mobile workshop.From this trailer, teaching and training has been done for school children on basic engineering and electronics.
Creative solutions:Prosthetic limbs
There are many amputees due to the bombings in the Mountains.There is a need for simple, locally available, prosthesis to help these victims.
Joshua has helped to design prosthetic limbs from available things in the market, like old bike parts and well tubing.To get a bit more of an insight into this man of mine, he was chuffed that these ‘arms’ only cost him 4 USD to build.
Joshua partners with the local churches by helping them put together the equipment to show the Jesus film and other material.
We have a group of youth who come to our home most evenings to collect the projector, speakers and charged battery pack so they can take it to show in a different part of the camp each night.
He also assists in programming solar-powered digital audio players that can take the gospel messages further than our feet can.
I often say that there isn’t much better than seeing your husband thrive and using his God-given gifts to their full potential. For all the challenges of life here, seeing him enjoy himself as he helps so many has been one of my greatest daily encouragements.
Grace and peace
Hope
Hallelujah in the Mountains 