I am now back home safe and sound, but not without a little suffering along the way—that included a weather-related missed flight connection in Dubai that added another 26 hours to our 24-hour travel itinerary. That suffering also included a cramped economy-class seat for 15 & 1/2 hours...the time it takes to fly from from Dubai to Newark. I knew we were in trouble when I boarded that plane and a flight attendant greeted me with a devilish smile and slowly said, “Hell! Oh!” (At least, that is what it sounded like.)

In the early morning of August 16 of last year, hundreds of Muslim extremists descended on five or six Christian neighborhoods in the Pakistan town of Jaranwala. It was an attack that had been planned for weeks in advance, justified on the basis of a false accusation of "blasphemy." Two Jaranwala Christians were accused of burning a copy of the Quran.

As if life isn’t difficult enough for Pakistan’s Marwari people, sometimes the wealthy Muslim landowners who hold them in economic slavery inform them they no longer need their labor. So they are forced to migrate—taking their meager belongings and debts with them—to where another landowner will hire them for the same slave wages. He will permit them to construct new mud and thatched-roof huts on a small plot of his ground. Finding water, of course, is their problem.

Today we visited several Marwari villages that have no access to safe water. One was the village of Mohamed Khan, where there are 40 families, of which 15 have become believers in Jesus over the last few years. They currently drink water from a semi-stagnant irrigation ditch which if often dry when the local landowner—for whom they all labor to pay off their debts—diverts the water flow to other locations. When that happens, they must walk further to gather dirty water.

Today we visited three more Marwari villages in Southern Pakistan that are benefitting from Heaven’s Family Safe Water projects. The inhabitants of today’s villages, just as was the case in the two villages we visited yesterday, are economic slaves. They work for wealthy Muslim landowners to whom they are perpetually in debt because of interest rates of 10% per month.

Greetings from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the world’s fifth-most populous nation. Heaven’s Family has been involved in many projects here over the years, and this is certainly not my first trip to Pakistan. Although Christians, both cultural and born-again, comprise just a tiny minority of Pakistan’s total population, they still number in the millions. They often suffer from some degree of persecution, which can become severe when someone is accused of insulting Islam’s prophet. That happened last August near the city of Faisalabad, and a number of churches and Christian homes were ransacked and burned.