As we look forward to the next few months here at Blood:Water, we are excited for continued hope and healing in Africa as a result of your generous support and our partners’ work. One upcoming event stands out among the rest: our annual Partner Summit, which will take place during the last week of September.

Our office will be a few staff members short in the coming weeks, as many of them will be traveling to Africa to participate in Partner Summit and meet with our partners in multiple countries. Don’t worry, we’ll keep you informed with their whereabouts. You’ll practically feel like you’re traveling through Africa right along with them!

Partner Summit is one of the ways we come alongside our partners to create long-term change in Africa, and it provides them with the opportunity to come alongside each other in a way that would not be possible otherwise. Each of our participating partners will be presenting on different topics related to clean water, health and hygiene, HIV/AIDS, and capacity building, so that we can learn from each other and continue our work in Africa successfully.

Join us! Well, maybe you can’t travel with us next week, but you can play an important role in the success of our Partner Summit. “How?” you ask. Pray. As much as we couldn’t continue our fight to end the HIV/AIDS and water crises in Africa without your financial support, we couldn’t do it without your prayerful support either.

We ask for your prayers to weaken the language barriers that sometimes present themselves while we interact with our partners in the field, and we ask that you would pray for the logistics of the summit. Many different people from many different areas of the world will be traveling to Ethiopia for Partner Summit, and as most of you know, travel of that magnitude can sometimes be accompanied by a host of hiccups. However, we believe that the work happening in Africa is the will of God for our lives, and according to 1 John 5:14, “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us – whatever we ask – we know that we have what we asked of him.”

To get a better idea of how you can pray for Blood:Water and our upcoming Partner Summit, watch this video from the 2016 Partner Summit!