Last week I traveled to New Orleans to attend the annual WEFTEC conference for my job as a water and wastewater engineer. The conference is huge, about 20,000 people and nearly 1000 exhibitors. My company has a big 20 ft by 20 ft booth and we spend three solid days talking to people about our technology. As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m also very involved in the leadership of the association that puts on the conference, WEF. So that means added meetings and events such as the community service project we did on Saturday.
I’ve been in the water industry for 11 years now, and I have a great many friends who I only see once a year at this convention, including all the employees at my company. I used to be in sales so I got to know a ton of people that way, but now I’m behind the computer full time doing research, design and marketing work. So getting face time with all these people energizes me. The community service project, using my connections in the water industry to make a positive impact on the local neighborhood, that energized me even more.
But nothing this past week made me feel the way a single conversation with a complete stranger did.
Let me back up. I decided to try a marketing campaign via Twitter for my company. So I carefully tweeted and followed the many water organizations and companies tweeting about the conference. Ned Breslin, CEO of Water for People, an organization I have supported in the past, was tweeting a lot of relevant stuff. Water for People hosted their first accountability summit at the show, launching an awesome new tool for making water project monitoring public and online, in an attempt to hold all the various charities doing water projects accountable. Too many well intentioned water projects fail and wells become unusable in less than a year.
One tweet caught my attention, because of a connection to the Together for Adoption Conference that also took place last weekend in Austin. I had followed all the tweets from that conference closely, wishing I could be there. So when I saw that someone from A Child’s Right, a group I’d never heard of, was at WEFTEC, I asked to talk to him. The same group had been mentioned by Esther Havens, an awesome humanitarian photographer whose work I follow closely.
So Aaron Walling, from A Child’s Right, did come by my company’s booth and I walked with him to a place where we could sit and really talk. He explained that his group focuses on putting water filtration systems into orphanages and hospitals and other places serving children in urban areas. I questioned why these water sources were not safe, and he explained how bad they really are. They are working in China, Nepal, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Thailand, and Tibet. They seem to be pretty well funded and efficient, serving hundreds of thousands of children in the three years they have existed.
a child’s right and HOPE Enterprises from a child’s right on Vimeo.
I explained my previous involvement with Water for People and Living Water International, as well as the heart for orphans that God has placed in me. He shared that he and his colleague are Christians and we had a long talk about water, orphans, adoption and how it seems the Lord is moving in the hearts of Christ-followers in our country. To connect with someone who shares my real passion, with whom I am bonded in Christ, was by far the most energizing part of the entire week. It has never happened before in the 11 years I have been coming to this conference. I always pray and ask Jesus to go with me and before me, but I often feel like my faith is set aside in some ways for that week. This week He led me to Aaron, and our conversation sustained me in ways I can’t even explain. This is what it means to be united in Christ and living in grace.
