Children of the Rock people play in the village of Huay Makliam.

That means most tribal villagers will soon be walking farther each day to find a source of fresh drinking water. They can spend an hour or more walking to the nearest stream to collect the water they need to survive.

But the residents of the village of Huay Makliam have quit making that trek each day since Baptist missionaries installed a water system. Now, they fill jugs from several water spigots scattered about the remote village near the Burmese border, which leaves the villagers more time to spend with their families and tend their crops.

The water project was spearheaded by Rick and Ellen Burnette, missionaries of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF). Rick, an agriculturalist, designed the project, which involved digging a two-mile trench from the nearest stream and burying plastic pipe to carry water into the village.

World-hunger funds from the Baptist General Convention of Texas paid for the project. Villagers did most of the work themselves ã digging the trench and carrying gravel and other supplies up the mountain.

The people of Huay Makliam were so enthused about the water project they dug the two-mile, foot-and-a-half deep trench in two days, Burnette said.

Rock people work together on a village water project.

"I showed up to see how far they had gotten and they were almost done," he said.

The water is filtered and stored in two huge tanks, then distributed throughout the village by a network of pipes. The water not used for drinking goes into an overflow pond, which can be used to irrigate crops.

Burnette hopes to use the pond to teach the villagers to raise fish as another source of food.

After the project was finished, the village held a dedication ceremony, celebrated in full tribal costume, which gave the missionaries a chance to declare the Christian purpose behind the project.

Water, the most basic physical need, is a good place to start in ministering to tribal people, Burnette said. "There's a water need in almost every village," he said.

Burnette said the water project is the first step in a long-term plan to meet the physical and spiritual needs of the Rock people, the most remote of Thailand's nine tribes. The Burnettes are the first CBF missionaries ã perhaps the first missionaries of any kind ã assigned to the tribe. They recently were joined by a medical specialist and an evangelist/church starter, rounding out the CBF's "holistic" strategy.

Marc Wyatt, the evangelist and church starter, and his wife, Kim, have two children. They are from North Carolina.

Ascanio Peguero was a doctor in the Dominican Republic before emigrating to the United States. He and his wife, Yanira, have three young children.

The Burnettes began their work among the Rock people in 1995.

Already the missionaries have established a presence in four villages of the Rock people, a tribe of refugees who are some of Thailand's poorest people.

The Rock people are so called because of the distinctive craggy rock formations that jut out from the mountain tops around their villages. The group's traditional tribal name is not used by missionaries because they fear other Rock people in neighboring countries will be persecuted.

There may be as many as 5,000 members of the tribe in about 10 villages in northern Thailand, but perhaps a million live in neighboring China, Laos and Burma, Burnette said. Since missionary activity is limited in those countries, Burnette hopes to establish a "beachhead" among the Rock people in Thailand that eventually will provide access to the tribe throughout Southeast Asia.

The Rock people are considered an "unreached people group" because most have never heard the Christian gospel. Their isolation is compounded by the fact that few outsiders speak the tribal language, and few Rock people know Thai.

Most Rock people practice an eclectic religion that blends animism, spiritism, Buddhism and traditional Chinese religion, all of which abound in Southeast Asia.

The Rock people -- perhaps because they are the most remote of the tribes -- have drawn little attention from missionaries.

"Someone decided the Rock people are not going to respond," said Burnette.

Burnette is not convinced the Rock people will be hard to reach -- there already is one Christian in Huay Makliam, he said. But neither is Burnette assuming quick success. The approach of the CBF missionaries is one of long-term investment.

"It could be we work here for the rest of our lives without seeing a whole lot happening," Burnette said. "I don't think we should look for results in a couple of decades."

Marc Wyatt said reaching the Rock people, like any other group, is a matter of overcoming spiritual barriers -- in this case the "layers and layers of fear" that characterize their religious practice.

"They have hopes and dreams like everyone else," Wyatt said. "They have hearts that want to know the truth. We have to take the patience to work through all the layers."

That means the CBF missionaries won't employ an aggressive, evangelistic style of witness anytime soon. Instead, they hope to earn the right to share their faith by meeting physical and emotional needs.

"We're very comfortable being servants in the work until a more direct presence is possible," said Wyatt.

In the team approach employed by the CBF, Burnette said, all three parts of the holistic strategy -- agricultural development, medical assistance and evangelism -- work together to present the complete picture of the gospel message. Evangelism without ministry is as unstable as "a two-legged stool," he said.

For instance, Ascanio Peguero said, one of the barriers to belief is the opium addiction so rampant among the Rock people. While Burnette's agricultural projects will help the tribe find other cash crops, Peguero is starting a drug-treatment program to help villagers kick the ancient habit.

"The only way they can fill the emptiness the opium leaves is with the spiritual part," said Peguero, who graduated from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Evidence that the CBF team is investing for the long haul includes the demonstration farm the missionaries have built a few miles away near the town of Fang.

Burnette is experimenting with farming techniques to help the Rock people make the best use of the limited land they have available. Huts have been built to house farmers who can come to learn the techniques, then return to their villages to put them to use.

Traditionally, tribes use slash-and-burn farming techniques, in which forest land is cleared and cultivated until the land becomes unusable. Then the farmers move on to clear more forest, leaving the land depleted of nutrients and nude of vegetation, which causes flooding and other problems.

Burnette and other agricultural missionaries are teaching conservation farming, which promotes crop rotation, composting and other techniques to improve on traditional tribal farming methods and make the most of what land the tribes have. Many of the methods Burnette is teaching were developed by agricultural missionaries in the Philippines.

Villagers from Huay Makliam, grateful for their new water system, helped build the demonstration farm, which is staffed by two full-time Rock workers and eventually will expand from the current 10 acres to 15.

The farm will also offer medical screening, a drug rehabilitation center, vocational training and a tribal craft workshop. "We want to help them preserve their traditional handicrafts and learn how to market them," said Ellen Burnette.

Improving the tribe's economic condition will make the Rock people less vulnerable to the social ills that have attacked Thailand's other tribes in recent years, particularly the sex trade.

So far the Rock people have not started selling their teenage girls into prostitution, as some tribes have. "There hasn't been a market for their daughters yet," Burnette said, in part because the tribe's presence in the northern hills, far from the countries urban centers, is not well known.

But economic pressures, made worse by widespread opium addiction, could change all of that. "If their economic situation doesn't improve, they can be just as vulnerable as the other tribes," said Peguero.

By giving the Rock people economic choices, the missionaries hope also to give them a safe future in their new homeland.