Coping in a Middle Eastern country without enough access to mains or 'living' water — just two challenges facing these friends of CMS who must remain anonymous. 
A mountainous country (Photo: © CMS) Drought has been declared in the mountainous country in the Middle East in which we live, reminding us of our first year there — 1999.
City electricity depends on a hydro-electric dam, and in 1999 we had 3 hours of mains electricity out of 24.
Mains water was switched from one neighbourhood to the next and, when pressure was low, each household pumped its own water to the roof tank.
Our neighbours would leave their electric pumps turned on, sucking the supply away as soon as the power came on. Precious little remained for us.
So we put a new water tank in at ground level, which filled up slowly in the small hours when everyone was asleep. In that way we were able to pump water when the mains water was off.
A regional water tower(Photo: © CMS)We developed a Heath Robinson system of pipes connecting the tank outside the kitchen window with the tank on the roof.
Once we had it all worked out, we moved house and started all over again in a new city in 2002.
This scenario finds echoes in what happens spiritually in the country as well. The spiritual drought was such that in 1993 there were no known believers in Christ nationally.
Gradually, that changed, but initially only young men responded to Christianity; women were very restricted in their movements. Men who married Muslim women soon stopped meeting with other believers.
Then a trickle of women became believers and a few church families were started — no more than you could count on the fingers of one hand.
The number of women becoming believers is still only a trickle, whereas, in the case of men, it could be described as a stream.
We know of four men who have solved this problem by marrying female Christians from overseas.
The ‘living water’ is available but it's in an adulterated form. Just as we have to treat our tap water before we can drink it, the spiritual teaching that is available in this locale is, to some extent, flawed.
The New Testament in the local language was initially printed in something of a rush.
Testing this version revealed a classic problem: the country is landlocked and few people have seen the sea. When asked to read the verse, "I will make you fishers of men," two students told us that it meant that Jesus is taking us from the small sin of hunting fish to the big sin of hunting (ie, killing) people.
A village with satellite dish reception(Photo: © CMS)The local church does not yet have the Old Testament and this sometimes leads to misinterpretations of the New Testament, since "the prosperity gospel" is reaching the homes of believers through satellite dishes.
Currently, the Old Testament exists only in draft form. When we return to our mountain fastness, checking and testing the Old Testament will become a full-time job.
The aim is to finish it by May 2010. Perhaps then the “streams of living water” may begin to flow into the wider community.