October 13th – Bolenge Hospital and the Drilling is Serious Now

(Mark Nash) So the team less Mark, Carmen and Jacques headed off to Bolenge this morning to tour the hospital and make a few presentations.  The tour included walking the halls of the old hospital and then the new buildings. The team made two presentations at the hospital.  David Owen presented a plaque to be hung in the new hospital in memory the son of a husband/wife team of Disciples missionaries, who died as a child in the DRC. His brother, now a medical doctor in the United States, donated the money for one of the new buildings.  Additionally, David presented a small plaque to be affixed to the new digital X-ray machine when it arrives for the family of the donor.

Our team then presented a plaque to be hung in the hospital recognizing Don and Barbara Angle from Central Christian Church in Enid.  The Angles were missionaries in the DRC from 1958 until 1974. Their Sunday School Class donated enough money to Disciples4Water for several wells.  The class, without Don and Barbara’s knowledge asked us to bring this plaque and have it hung in the hospital at Bolenge.  Several years ago, after the old hospital burned, this same class donated $25,000 to assist in the rebuilding effort.

As we walked through the walls, we could all see miraculous things the medical team here in Bolenge has done with the resources they have to work with. We really take for granted what we have in the US from a healthcare perspective, but what the Congolese have done here make this hospital state of the art, and a model for other rural hospitals around the DRC.

One of the most memorable moments was when the team got to see a couple of newborn babies and their proud mothers. We met Stefan who was less then a week old and another baby girl that was only three days old. Such cuties!

While one group was visiting the hospital the drill team moved the rest of our equipment over from Mbandaka Three to the new drill site (Bokelimba), which is northeast of town in a small village of refugees, who moved in to the area after the last war looking for work.  The guys were hard at it already when Carmen, Jacques and I arrived at 7:15.

After breaking through the last of the latterite layer we found yesterday, we were drilling in clay mixed with rock and a bit of sand.  Not the same type of hard compressed clay we had at Mbandaka Three, so the going is much easier.

I took a few minutes off and went across the road to video the soil conditions in the well (dirty water) there.  I then was able to get a driver to take me up the road about a mile to a well we saw a week ago.  This well, dug by hand, was 12 to 15 feet deep and made for a great video of the layers of soil in the area.

Before I left this well site, I was introduced to the family that lives here and showed them the video I had taken inside their well. Just as I was getting ready to leave, one little bitty girl about 15 months old came tottering through the crowd.  She walked straight up to me and placed her head on my chest, looked up and smiled.  It was definitely a Kodak moment.

Back at the well site, our team called it a day at ten meters (33 feet).  Great progress on the official Day One at well site two.

Good Morning from the Congo!

Sorry, due to some connection issues, this is being posted several days late. From Janet:

Good Morning from the Congo!    

Written by Janet Helms

Today is Tuesday, October 7^th. It is 6:30 am and I am sitting on the porch overlooking the Congo river.  Words cannot describe its beauty.  It isn’t that it is the most scenic place but it is the feeling and the life of it that makes it special.  From here I can hear voices all around, the sound of children laughing and singing waft up to greet me as I have my morning quiet time.  Canoes travel by up and down the river full of men, women, families…all on their way somewhere to make today’s living.  Many wave when they see me up the hill and call out in Lingala, all with bright smiles on their faces. 

Besides being overwhelmed with the sights and sounds, as Mark  so eloquently shared with you, the emotions that we have experienced are also overwhelming.  As we first rode through Mbandaka from the airport, down the bumpy, dusty road, tears streamed down my face as I stared out the side window.  It was beyond anything that I had imagined   I am certain that all of us were moved by the first sights of this place that has been in our dreams for over a year.  There was silence in the car as we tried to take it all in. 

Mark is doing such a great job of detailing our journey I thought I would just fill in with some moments.  One such moment was with Mark himself.  When we first arrived at the guest house and were getting settled I took a walk down towards the river.  The guest house sits up on a hill and though fenced and unable to get directly to the river without going through a gate, you can walk part way down the hill and get closer to the boats and water.  Mark caught up with me underneath one of the big beautiful trees.  He bump his shoulder next time mine and said “we’re here”.  I told him “I think I’m going to lose it”, and he responded with “and you should”.  So, though I didn’t sit down and cry underneath that tree overlooking the Congo river I did allow the tears to stream down my face and take in the emotions that surrounding me.  This is where God has lead us!

The two church services that we have attended so far have been very emotional.  The Sunday service was one of the most spectacular events of my life .  Again, tears streamed down my face for the first hour of the service but it was with a constant smile on my face.  Mark has described the beautiful events of the worship with the music being a focal point.  Interestingly we didn’t need to know the language to be able to worship.  We were one with God and it showed in the faces of the six of us.  Through tears and smiles we danced and sang with the Congolese.  I wasn’t ready to leave 4 hours later.  How could we stop this joyous celebration of God’s love?   What I am learning is these people don’t stop celebrating when they leave church.  This joy goes with them and they share it freely.  We have a thing or two to learn from them.  Let’s never leave our church building on Second Street in Edmond, Oklahoma without taking the joy with us and sharing it freely!  

I was honored to be able to speak at this Sunday service and the smaller Monday service.  I attempted to share that I felt that God had lead us to this place.  And we were honored to be their guests.  Humbled and in awe I stood before them feeling inadequate.  I have so much to learn from them!    This Monday’s sermon was tied specifically to our water project.  As the sermon was being translated to us Frank turns to me with tears in his eyes and takes my hand.  Here we sit in a chapel in Mbandaka Congo being honored by the beautiful people knowing that this is all God’s plan!  

We have been doing our daily devotional each night.  The group gets together and we take turns reading the scripture and the study.  Without fail every single one has been appropriate for us.  The strength and encouragement we receive from these are a direct result of the love that our congregation has extended to us.  We also open up the discussion for any thoughts and concerns that we have that day.  So far there have been no major issues.  I personally am having a difficult time not communicating with my family but I am trying to embrace being here and not being distracted by home.  I pray that God is taking care of everyone and that my heart will be soothed. 

One final note for today….this group is nuts!  We are treating each other like one big family which includes much teasing and joking.  There have been a lot of laughs.  God knew what he was doing when he put us together.  I’ve been sworn to secrecy so I can’t share specifics but once I’m out of the line of fire I might be able to tell on my friends!   But keep that between you and I so no one puts a bat in my room tonight. 

October 12th – A Day of Rest: Not at All!

(Mark Nash) Sunday services and rest were the schedule for our second Sunday in the DRC.  Sounds simple right?  No way!  We had another four hour church service that didn’t seem anywhere near that long; other than the opening prayer that lasted more than ten minutes.  Six offerings were held for various causes for the 899 people in attendance on this Sunday.

And very similar to last week, this congregation took up an offering of food to give to us; their very special guests.  Included in the pile of food was papayas, bananas, tomatoes, pineapples, a few fruits I have no idea what they are called, sugar cane and a chicken.  Yes, I said that right.. a live chicken.

After church they hosted a short reception for us were we had Coca Cola, Orange Fanta, and Cherry Soda.  We stood under an awning made of palm fronds among the many motorcycles parked by church members before the service.  Just as we have seen so many other places since we got here, the children crowded around.  We asked their names and took pictures with them, there was lots of laughing.

As many of you know, in the afternoon we held a communion service from the church around the corner from Rev. Bonanga’s house.  As a part of this service we used a video streaming service over a satellite back to First Christian in Edmond.  The picture and sound wasn’t so great at our end, but the people in attendance thought it was magnificent.  And the report we got back from Edmond was that picture and sound were actually pretty good at that end.  So, Frank chalked it up as a success.

While we were attending the communion service, Carmen and Jacques worked with six of our drill team members to move some equipment to the second well site northeast of town.   They determined the best spot to drill and quickly cut a two meter hole which actually included rock and laterite.  This meant that we have a good opportunity to learn ahead of us.  Our team will get to use the remainder of the tools while we are here after all.  

October 11th – Fish Market and Family

The drill team started this morning for the second day in a row without anyone from our team in attendance.  This is a sign of great progress that they are both capable and motivated to drill on their own.  While the drill team got after their task, our team decided to go a bit easier and try to replenish some lost energy.

So what did we do?  We just got up at 5:00 and headed to the fish market for a bit of sightseeing.   By 5:45 we were headed into the Mbandaka equivalent of Homeland or Super Walmart.  Since there is no electricity in this region other than by generator, the vast (and I do mean vast) majority of people do not own a refrigerator.

We saw fish of all kinds and sizes.  We saw manioc leaves and roots.  Cooked manioc, bananas both cooked and fresh, along with beans and other spices were everywhere.  Some vendors had giant pots of palm oil.  Most of these pots had small pans with fires in them floating in the top of the oil to keep it from solidifying.

We passed one stall where the woman was selling a monkey that had been hunted, killed and cleaned the previous day.  Men drug pigs here and then there in preparation for slaughter so that they could sell the freshest of fresh pork to customers. 

What fascinated me most was the peli peli peppers.  I saw eight or ten vendors with large quantities spread out in their stalls.  These small orange and red peppers resemble a habanera or scotch bonnet pepper.  They also taste very similar, and their heat factor, just like the habanera, is ridiculous.  The locals make a pepper sauce called peli peli, which explains what is in it.  All of us have been eating this sauce almost daily.

And I can’t forget to mention the turtles, giant snails, really really big grub worms and caterpillars (we actually had caterpillars with our dinner Thursday night).  The stalls that all of these products were in were nothing more than bamboo posts with palm frond roofs and either bamboo or stick tables and shelves.  Many of the vendors just threw mats on the ground and set their merchandise out.

There were hundreds of vendors and easily ten thousand customers crammed into an area about the size of downtown Edmond.  

There is no way to accurately describe what we saw today.  Truly amazing.  This is daily life in Mbandaka.  Go to the market every morning and buy what you need to make breakfast lunch and dinner.  We have pictures that can’t really explain the sounds and smells, all which are quite foreign to us Okies from the United States.

Meanwhile back at the drill site, the guys are making progress.  Down to 23 meters (75 feet) now, we began to see some aggregate in our clay.  After losing an hour’s work time yesterday to a storm that dumped more than three inches very quickly, we had the same thing happen again after lunch today.

Tomorrow is a day of rest, as we will be attending church in the morning and then satellite linking in for a joint church service with FCC Edmond in the afternoon.  The drill team though, instead of taking the entire day off, will move to well site two for more training as we search for something other than clay to drill through.  Wish them luck and say a little prayer.   

A Geek’s Log from the Congo

(Frank Gresh) When I committed to going on this trip a year or so ago, I knew that I could be doing a lot of things. David Owen from Global Ministries said they could possibly use my help with technology at the national office of the Disciple’s denomination here in Mbandaka. I thought that would be a good fit for my skill set and it seemed like there were going to be others who’s area of expertise was better suited to drilling for water than mine, so I was happy to have a job that I felt capable of doing.

Well here I sit in Mbandaka, five days in to helping with some technical challenges they are having and we haven’t made that much forward movement. As I posted on Facebook, there have been several times I wanted to run down to Best Buy, Office Depot, or maybe Lowes and pick up some simple things that would help (WiFi Router, External CD-ROM Drive, voltmeter, power strips, software, extension cords, etc.), but none of those are available anywhere here. So, back to the basics of making do with what we have and finding a way to make it work.

Connections to the Internet are very limited here. There’s really only a couple of ways of doing that, Satellite and some sort of shared WiFi service that I don't fully understand. The maximum bandwidth being offered by the local provider here is about 3Mbps down and 768Kpbs up. For those of you with a cable modem or some other high speed Internet, that is about 10 times slower than you basic service there in the US. For the maximum connection speed you would have to pay roughly $4,000 a month.

I was working with a local company here (my new friend Junior Mboyo) to get a trial Internet connection up and running (the previous Internet company went out of business, and the interim provider is painfully slow and unstable), I found myself trying to ask questions and explain things across two or three languages (words like coax cable, average ping, Quality of Service, Service Level Agreement). It was a true challenge just to get simple stuff accomplished, but with the help of Junior and his team, we have been quite successful.

When I have time to write down more of my thoughts I will, but for now, the Internet connection is back up on a new Router that they had across town at the Mbandaka Post (Mbandaka Regional Office – kind of like the Oklahoma Regional Office), so I have some more work to do…

Love and thanks to all…

Frank

October 10th – Drilling and a Couple of Tours

(Mark Nash)  Friday was a day full of incredible stops on our journey to the DRC.  Steve and I did not start the day off with the drill team for a change.  Our team is really coming together as they learn how to drill in this incredibly harsh environment.  Because it looked like more of the same, based on how we ended the day yesterday, we made the decision to join David Owen and the women on our team for the morning.

The day started with a stop at a kindergarten located on the campus of a girls’ school.  After David showed our video of our church’s children’s choir singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”, the 41 children in the kindergarten class sang it to us in French.  The children laughed as Rev. Bonanga tried to lead them.  It was quite a wonderful sight to watch. 

Before I tell you what they did for us, let me describe their classroom.  It is a former classroom at the girls school divided in half by old sheets of plywood.  They only use the half closest to the door that goes outside.  There is no door on the opening though; just as there are no longer any panes of glass on the windows.  An electrical box hangs uncovered on a wall in the back corner with wires hanging out and down within reach of the children sitting in the back row.  Not to worry, since there is no electricity in the building during the day.

There are ten desks in the room.  Each desk is made of wood with a bench seat attached; much like you would expect to see in an old western movie showing a schoolhouse on the prairie.  Four children sit at each desk, with the exception of the one desk that has five little bodies piled onto the bench.  Four teachers dressed in bright yellow, pink, gold and navy dresses moved about the class encouraging, and occasionally hushing, students.

Just as in America, you can pick out the precocious kid in the class.  This one little girl was full of animation throughout our visit.  When they started singing she was in back. By the time they were through to no one’s surprise, she had made her way to the front row and was really hamming it up for us.

When the children had their chance they sang their hearts out for us.  Every child filled the aisle in between the two rows of desks.   They sang and danced and cheered as they showed their appreciation for us visiting them.  We left a few gifts of books, balls and crayons and moved on, all of our hearts moved by this group of three to five year old children.

From this school, we drove south to Bolenge where we toured a women’s nutrition farm run by the Disciples of Christ Church in the Congo.  This fifty acre farm produces manioc (both roots and leaves are harvested vegetables), corn, tomatoes, egg plant, and peanuts. 

The farm is staffed by 50 Pygmy women who have moved into the area as refugees after years of war, discrimination and slavery in the region.  As part of the process of blending them into modern society in the DRC, these women and their children are allowed to live on the farm in huts built near a well, and tend the fields.

They harvest what they need to live on, and then sell a bit more on the roadside each day or in the market in Mbandaka.  They have a single well of non-potable water that they carry in buckets into the fields to water the plants when the seasonal rains cannot provide enough moisture in this oppressive heat.  As we walked through a ten acre field of manioc, egg plants and peanuts, we saw approximately 25 women, some with infants strapped on their backs, weeding the rows of crops.

After we came into their small village beside the field, the entire crew of pygmies stopped their work and all headed for the village as well in single file.  As the first woman came through the gate into the village they all burst into song.  The singing continued until they were all in the village lined up in front of us. 

After another song, one woman stepped forward and welcomed us to the farm.  She thanked us for coming and being interested in what they were doing to change their lives.  Then she stepped back into the line and listened as Gwen explained our interest in their farm since Oklahoma is known as an agriculture state in the U.S. 

Before we left, the director of Women’s Ministries for the Disciples of Christ Church presented the women with eight plastic lined canvas backpacks with spigots on them for hauling water.  The PackH2Os  as they are known were warmly received by these women that have been carrying water into the fields, as well as walking almost a mile one-way to a spring for clean water.

After lunch we returned to the drill site to see the progress.  Our team continued to drill through clay all day and by day’s end we were down to 20 meters (66 feet).  The progress is slow but steady, and our team is learning more each day.

Our team hopes that tomorrow we will see something come out of that hole other than red clay.  So do we!

October 9th – Drilling Day 3

When we arrived at the well today, we had nearly four meters (just over 12 feet) of mud that had fallen from the walls of the well into the bottom of the bore hole.  We spent most of the morning bringing the mud out.  Our new team wanted to use some of the other tools instead of the auger since they had learned about them the afternoon before.  But after explaining to several of them why the auger was still the best way to proceed, the best of the team took charge and told the team how to proceed.

We would have had the mud out much sooner, but it rained hard for nearly an hour.  Not wanting to get anyone electrocuted by lightening striking our drilling tubes which stick 24 feet up in the air when we extract them from the hole, we took a break to let the storm pass.  Once the mud was cleared, progress moved forward very quickly.

Our team is learning well, and several team members have stepped up and show great promise as team leaders.  It will be difficult to determine the A and B teams as we finish our training.

While Steve and I (Mark, if you haven’t figured this out yet) work the drill site with Jacques and Carmen from Water 4, the rest of the team is continuing to visit schools in the area and learning about the community needs that have to be addressed for water to become sustainable in the long run. 

At day’s end, the team we were still in clay at 16 meters (52.5 feet).  Ten feet of progress does not sound like a lot for a day, but as hard as this clay is, that is really good for a new team.  And the most exciting part is that we definitely have been able to identify an A and B team for drilling after we leave.  There are some really sharp guys who have stepped up to be part of this from the local area.

Tomorrow, Steve and I are going with the rest of team to tour a kindergarten and a nutrition farm as we continue to understand the local needs (all which start with clean water).  In the afternoon we will return to the drill site.  Please say a small prayer that we hit gravel, rock or sand soon!