Friday, June 06, 2014
For the past couple of days we have spent more time in the office. President McMullin has had us working on preparing for our road trip which begins next Friday the 13th. It is the “roughing it trip” where we will be gone for 11 days mostly without water and without electricity. This is referred to as the interior and is the “real African” experience. We are stopping in 4 towns: Luputa, Mbuji-Mayi, Mwene Ditu, and Tshitenge. The President is going to his last zone conferences in these areas and is also taking us along to introduce us to the priesthood leadership throughout the mission.
Our first stop is in Luputa, which is a community of around 250,000-300,000. The largest humanitarian water project ever constructed was in Luputa and is described in the welfare video called “100 Days” The project was to pipe water from springs to the town which was over 18 miles away from the springs. The local volunteers including church members dug by hand a trench that was a meter wide and a meter deep to pipe the water. They have a large tank system in the center of town that has 2 large tanks each hold 400cubic meters of water.
The seams have begun to leak and the system is failing after only 3-4 years of use. The problem here in Africa is that there seems to be no concept of long-term maintenance. Often when things fail they are abandoned and never repaired. LDS Charities has invested nearly $4 million in this project and they have been petitioned to approve phase 2. They have decided not to approve phase 2 and have also decided not to invest any more money in a project that is not being maintained. This is the South Africa Area Welfare Office decision.
President McMullin sees it differently and says we need to do whatever is necessary to salvage the project for the people and the community. He has asked me to become familiar with the background of the project and to acquire a list of key personnel to contact. I studied the project history in the humanitarian computer data base referred to as CHaS (church humanitarian accounting system) We discovered that our friends, Lester and Joan Moody, were part of this project when they served their previous mission in DRC. They are currently in Gabon. We emailed and called after reading much of their personal accounts recorded in CHaS. They provided the key contact who is Dominque Sowa, the chief engineer who worked for ADIR, the project contractor.
After Shelley found Dominque’s contact information on facebook as well, we sent an email from President McMullin inviting him to travel with us next week to Luputa to evaluate what needs to be done to resurrect the project. He also sent an email to Johannesburg inviting Kenneth Mofokeng, the area water specialist to accompany us on our trip to Luputa. The President is a man of action. Dominque replied that he is not available but has an assistant who can attend. We are still waiting to hear from Phillip and Kenneth in Johannesburg for their approval.
There is another project that President McMullin is intent on seeing something done. In Tshitenge which is just outside of Mbuji-Mayi, the branch president donated his home to the church for a meetinghouse but the membership has outgrown the home. They meet outside under some banana trees in a grove. All the visiting general authorities visit and they have been promised several improvements, but none have materialized. They has a new chapel approved over 2 years ago but when the building was designed it came back as a Bountiful, US type chapel. They suggested to change it to a design that could be constructed of local materials so it could be maintained and repaired locally. Then everything fell silent. No water development, no building and no follow-up.
President McMullin called Phillip and Kenneth in Johannesburg and told them he is going to haul a couple of contractors to the site and get an estimate on the cost of developing water. He sensed that he received their approval and we plan on doing just that when we visit there next week.
We spent the day visiting with UNICEF regarding the school latrine project at Mapendano School. I’ve mentioned this school facility that houses two elementary schools and a secondary school. They have 2,600 students and 32 latrines that don’t work. They have installed 4 temporary latrines which are used by the entire student body. UNICEF was responsible for making improvements to 16 of the 32 latrines. However, they only installed doors and painted the bathroom and installed a water point but made no improvements to the septic system or repairing the piping.
We asked them if they were finished with their investment or whether they intended to do any more work there. We would like to partner with them in the future because they do 35-50 water and sanitation projects annually. They have it down to a science. That is the reason I didn’t understand why they had done such a poor job on this one. They will meet with us again on Monday with a detailed report. We also asked them to identify their priority of projects for the coming year where there may be a possibility of working together in partnership. They also said they would help us in reviewing the quotes we will receive from Pere Gideon for improvements to the Mapendano School. The first one was for over $17,000 and sometimes the organization asks for the moon.
The mission home was also the site a zone conference today. We were invited for dinner and we took some pictures of the elders and sisters. All the missionaries are from African countries who speak French. Most of the missionaries are from Kinshasa, which is the largest French-speaking city in the world. They have 8-10 million population and it is the location of the other mission in DRC. Most of the prospective missionaries from Lubumbashi go the Kinshasa for their missions. President McMullin said the missionary age change has not resulted in more sister missionaries in DRC. He also said that contrary to the sister missionaries in state-side missions, sisters here are the weak link and not the superstars like they often are in other missions.
The missionaries eat like there is no tomorrow and we couldn’t believe the sisters could out eat many of the elders. I’ll post a few pictures as evidence. We have gotten closer to the missionaries even though we can’t speak their language, we can hug and wrestle with them to show our affection. We are becoming color-blind, but it is still hard to remember names. They say that all white people look alike and we definitely fall into that mindset of thinking all blacks look alike.
Our friends, the Clawson, are off to Likasi and Kolwezi again this weekend. They are working on apartments and assisting with transfers. The senior sisters in the office are going to be our drivers this weekend. We are working off the generator as we speak. The electricity is often out all day but is generally on in the evenings for 3-5 hours from 6:00 on. The generator is loud and yet is a comfort to be able to charge all of our devices. That has become a full-time job just to keep them charges. We are loving our Apple products. Our phones serve as a portable wi-fi called a hotspot.
Tomorrow is our preparation day we have our list of chores, just like old home week. I have taken a renewed interest in washing dishes, doing the laundry, mopping the floors and carrying out the trash. I’m still a long-term project, but Shelley has been patient. She had the foresight to bring bread pans and we live on peanut butter and jam sandwiches for lunch. We even made a little tuna. Not the same without miracle whip. We’ve been here for three weeks tomorrow. It seems like 3 years, each day seems to last forever but all the days run together. Our mission home staff and area welfare support team could not have been better. They pamper us and treat us a newbies and we appreciate it. I’ll write again this weekend.
Love, Dad
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