On the First Day of Drilling...a pear tree would have been nice.

Weather: 

warm, sunny morning

hot, sunny midday

hot, muggy, cloudy afternoon

The pigs wanted to root in the yard, but were terrified of the drill and the local dogs.  You can see the drill rig in the background.

A little girl joined me on the porch to watch the action.

The drill rig and the marvelous blue tarp of heaven.  

The guys were separating pebbles for the filter from sand for the concrete. 

Cuttings after the mud was washed off.  This was the rock we had so much trouble getting through.

Day 1 of drilling was a lot of fun.  Since we were all learning, it was great to be active, but laid-back.  I thoroughly enjoyed each position rotation for its own merit--driller for the break, assistant driller for the painting the pipes with oil and the relative complexity of the tasks, tool pusher for taking samples of the cuttings and seeing what kind of gunk we were progressing through.  The significance of the tool-pusher is that the cuttings would let us know when water was close or not.  There was no spurting or bubbling up of water when we "hit" it.  The geology would let us know by giving us tiny gravel/sand cuttings.  The helper's task of keeping the pits clean was mostly overtaken by the locals, so that person drank water. 

We drilled 80 feet, finally getting stuck in some rock, which put us at a standstill for an hour or so.  When the bit was spinning on the rock, I first prayed that God would remove the rock from our path.  Then God reminded me that He is the God who brought water from the rock, and that we were to, as Brian read from Psalms, "praise the Lord and the land will yield its harvest."  So I praised God for being the God who sometimes takes away obstacles in our path, but sometimes uses them as Ebenezers or mile markers of His glory and to remind us of what He has done. 

It wasn't until the poor drill couldn't take any more of the beating against the rock that our foreman called a meeting to ask us to take the whole setup down for the night and that we'd be casing tomorrow.  A light dawned in my mind--we had hit water a while back!  The whole time we were praying and worrying (the last team from our church had to move the well twice because of rock they'd hit), our drill bit was going through that rock to help the pump to be run through an aquifer--a natural purifying rock that would help the well stay clean and fresh and flowing even when drought comes.  God had indeed brought water from the rock.  The obstacle was a blessing.