Build an agricultural school in the driest desert in the world? That was what the Chilean Methodist Church asked of veteran agricultural/rural development missionary Stanley Moore.
He arrived with his wife, Beryl, and youngest son Andrew, in the northern Chilean port city of Iquique in September of 1988, questioning the logic of the task to which he had been assigned.
But soon it became apparent why he was being asked to undertake this seemingly senseless assignment. The livelihood of the 14,000 Aymara Indians who lived in the northern Andes depended on agriculture. Their very lives were reliant on what crops they could grow in the areas where sufficient water from precipitation in the high elevations made cultivation possible. Yet there was no agricultural school within a thousand miles for the youth to learn modern technology that, combined with time-tested traditional practices, could help improve production and consequently improve their lives.
He soon found, however, that for this project, there was no budget, no office, not even a typewriter or a sheet of paper. Worse yet, he was handed a $23,000 debt resulting from the purchase of a bus three years prior to his arrival, intended for a similar program that never got off the ground. The task seemed impossible.
This is the story of how that “Impossible Dream” became a reality.