Prayer Watch: Pray for the Africa Water Emergency

As our weather warms up and our days turn hot and dry, we begin to realize that we really do need to drink water. Sometimes we even work outside in the heat and forget to drink enough water—what happens? We get dehydrated and that can put our life in danger. Today I’m asking that we pray for the people in Africa, a mostly hot dry continent where mothers, children, grandmas and grandpas are dying—just because they don’t have enough clean water.

There is a massive “tent city,” refugee camp where families are watching their children die because there is not enough clean water for everyone.

In this huge refugee camp, there are six national Bible translators also in dire need of water. Though they need water—they also need to translate Scripture for their people.

My dear prayer partners—these dear Bible translators are asking for help with translating so of course we want to and will help them. At the same time, we need to recognize their dire need for water. We must help these people, just surviving, in this huge tent city, yet doing the work God gave them to do.

Let’s pray over God’s Word for this precious team using a familiar story.

Now he [Jesus] had to go through Samaria. So, he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.

• Please pray that funds will be given so that a Wycliffe Associate team can arrange for a well to be drilled so that clean water will be provided for every man, woman, and child in this refugee camp.

When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

• Ask the Lord to provide this translation team in the refugee camp with health sustaining foods so they can do their work of translation.

The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)

• Please pray that these translators will also be catalyst for getting fresh clean water for this camp of people in a country foreign to them all.

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

• Pray that these translators will soon have God’s Word and His living water translated for their people.

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”

• What a blessing a deep well of fresh water will be to the camp and to the translators at work to get Scripture to their friends and family.

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

• Please ask the Lord to use this translation team to bring the “spring of water welling up to eternal life” to the suffering people all around them.

 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”
John 4:4-16 NIV

• Please pray for the people in this huge refugee camp, in a country not their own, needing to know Jesus who gives living water that brings eternal life. Pray that the entire process of getting a well for this translation team in the midst of a huge camp will become a place where refugees will find Jesus.

Thank you, dear ones, for your diligence in praying for the ministry of Bible translation and spreading the Word that Jesus brings life—even eternal life.