  In 2000, we started the program ``Building the Bridge between Damped Ly-alpha
Absorbers and Lyman-Break Galaxies: Ly-alpha Selection of Galaxies'' at the
European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. This project is an
attempt to use Ly-alpha selection of high-z galaxies to bridge the gap between
absorption- and emission-selected galaxies by creating a large database of z=3
galaxies belonging to the abundant population of faint (R>25.5) galaxies probed
by the Damped Ly-alpha Absorbers (DLAs). Here we present the first results of
our program, namely the results from a deep Ly-alpha study of the field of the
z=2.85 DLA towards Q2138-4427.
