August 17, 2014 - Clark

Sunday, August 17, 2014

This week won’t be a travel log of events and dates but there was one common theme which comes from 1Nephi 4:6; “And I was led by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do”.  We have had so many undeniable experiences of this during the current week that I just have to share a few examples.  

We usually try to schedule out our day but appointments get cancelled and moved and we always have to have a backup plan.  Such was the case several times this week with the outcome almost like someone else was in charge of our schedule.  We went to the Ministry of Health to visit with the director of immunizations to apologize because the church had already spent the DRCongo money in Kinshasa on a measles campaign, but he referred us to the Ministry of Home Affairs who are conducting a door to door registration campaign for immunizations September 25-27.  We had the approval of Justin Kabala who works in the mission office and is a stake president to volunteer the membership of the 3 stakes here to assist with the registration as a service project.  This will impact the members and probably accomplish much more than the original $35,000 that was allocated for the measles campaign.

We have been working on the Katuba bridge project for 3 months and everything that could go wrong, has.  Imagine our surprise when in a single day after our schedule was completely rearranged that we gathered all final quotations, met with the architect, visited his completed jobs, had a conference with the church director of construction who approved the awarding of the contract to our preferred contractor and provided us 100% of the materials necessary to submit our proposal.  We went in on Saturday and completed the proposal.

There was a wheelchair project planned for Lubumbashi for 2014 in the amount of $240,000 but it has been rough sledding.  The Ministry of Health had partnered with the church in 2012 on a similar project and had yet to complete the reporting required under their original contract.  We have spent over 2 months attempting to gather the reports and have yet been unsuccessful.  Elder Dow is the church-wide specialist in wheelchairs and had told us we could not work with the ministry of health on another wheelchair project and he thought it was probably out of the question for 2014.  Imagine our surprise when we were visiting the Ministry of Social Affairs when the Director introduced us to not only the director of orphanages but also the director of handicapped services.   I may have mentioned this before but the long and short of it is that his department can be a possible partner for the wheelchair project.  Elder Dow has approved this affiliation and we meet with the director tomorrow to review possible arrangements.  We may yet pull off the wheelchair project in 2014.

Mom has had several experiences with her maturation project from local involvement to help from complete strangers, but I’ll let her tell those stories.

We felt fortunate but frustrated with the bureaucracy of project approval this past week.  There are 8 countries in our sector and each has a missionary couple and in some cases two who have submitted proposal requests over the past month with a backlog of probably 30-40 projects.  We have a new member of our Area Presidency, Elder Ellis who has single-handedly brought the entire process to almost a complete standstill.  He was initially alone because the other two were traveling and he put everything on hold until they returned and when they did he wanted to revise the approval process.  They only approved 4 proposals this past week.   One of them was ours but we have three others that haven’t seen the light of day.  Elder Ellis is coming to Lubumbashi this week and it will difficult not to give him a piece of our mind.

We are also involved in an emergency response incident.  It’s important to understand a little about open marketplaces here in DRCongo.  They are like a massive flea market where anything goes and there are masses of people who frequent these markets.  There is a road to the Lubumbashi Stake Center that originally attracted a few vendors but it grew like wildfire over the past few years because it bordered on a major paved road with lots of traffic and lots of potential shoppers.  The Church approached the municipality a few years ago with a request to relocate the market.  The municipality came back with a $39,000 price tag and the Church said no.  This past week there was a fire in this marketplace that spread and destroyed the entire market.  The municipality is in the process of cleaning up the fire and relocating the 250-300 vendors who are out of business.  The municipality sent a letter of request for help from the church.

This request is being watched by Johannesburg, Kinshasa and the Area Presidency.  Some vendors feel the Church may have in some way been responsible for their displacement.  The most common theory on the fire is that it started from large pots containing beans that were cooking overnight and unattended.  We read the letter of request and met on Thursday with Desire Ilunga, Lubumbashi Director of Facilities Management (FM) and Mbidi Ilunga, Lubumbashi Director of Public Affairs in formulating a plan for contacting the municipality on Friday.  Thursday night I was impressed to met with Elder Brent Atkinson, who has been an instructor in the church construction training program.  I thought we could potentially hire graduates from the program to assist in rebuilding the vendors’ booths.  He had a better idea; he said a new group of 10 trainees and 2 instructors are starting a program this next week where they receive classroom instruction 1 hour and work on an approved construction job for 3 hours in order to obtain training for their certification.  They work for free and he said their project is not ready to go and he thought the rebuilding of the booths would meet the certification requirements.  The bottom line is we have recommended that we supply all materials requested by the municipality and our own labor force who would control the issuance and utilization of the materials.  Another coincidence.  (Not approved yet but looks like a “no-brainer")

I want to conclude with the best story of the week.  I told you last week about Elder Atkinson volunteering to pay for all materials for pump repairs if the mission president would approve our proposed project.  Well the president’s response was “make it so”.  We organized a well repair project on Friday.  The stake center pump was supposedly broken.  Elder Atkinson hired two repairmen to teach him how to repair these pumps; he has one of his own at home and feels he can do it on his own but wanted to see the local process and discover where the materials can be purchased for repair.  He asked me if I knew of any returned missionaries who he could employ to be trained in pump repair.  I mentioned that I was impressed with a young RM by the name of Steve who had been the chairman for the Kisanga Stake Center open house last Saturday.  I had asked Steve for his contact information a week ago before this project ever materialized.  I told him that I might be able to give him a referral in the future.  He is a returned missionary, second counselor in the Bishopric, a university graduate in network engineering and can’t find a job.  (a very common story here in DRCongo)  

When Elder Atkinson visited the Kisanga Stake Center on Friday, he found the pump was working just fine.  The reason they said it was broken was that when they began pumping, they saw some rust in the water.  He didn’t find a pump to repair at the Stake Center but Steve was there.  Elder Atkinson visited with him and felt impressed to employ him as his first pump repair trainee.  Elder Atkinson did find another broken pump to repair and I was able to participate in the repair.  Finding parts is the most challenging problem but these two repairmen showed us around.  The main supply shop is 3-4 miles from our home in a rough part of town.  We spent the entire day repairing the pump.  We had been quoted $100-150 for pump repair before but didn’t realize that didn’t include the cost of materials which in this case were almost $400.  There are also specialized tools required to lift both plastic and metal piping out of the bore hole.  They usually range in the neighborhood of 100-120 feet deep.  Best of all the pump actually worked when we were finished.

Elder Atkinson is fairly short and quiet and unassuming but in his past he was a green beret.  Imagine my surprise when on Saturday when we returned home from the mission home with the mission president to visit our apartment complex, I saw Elder Atkinson hauling 3 large wrenches (2-3 feet long) and the vice to hold the pipe, all in his backpack.  These items had to weigh 125-150 pounds and he had walked to the supply store (3 miles +) away, paid over $500 of his own money, and carried all these specialized tools back home in his hands and in his backpack.  What a stud!  The mission president asked Elder Atkinson who was financing this project.  I told him it was not yet approved as a humanitarian project and Elder Atkinson said he would pay for the materials if the cost of labor was covered by someone else.  The mission president said he had a nice Catholic lady back home that had asked if she could send $5,000 for a worthy cause.  He said he thought he had found one.  I’m sure the mission or humanitarian would probably eventually have been able to reimburse Elder Atkinson but he did all this on his own with no expectation of reimbursement.  

By the way we attend a different ward every week of the 25+ wards in the area.  It was not by design and yet I believe it was no accident that the ward we attended was the ward where Mbidi Ilunga is the Bishop and Steve is his second counselor.  Steve was overjoyed at our attendance and Elder Atkinson was asked to bear his testimony.  I don’t know what he said, but I know what he does.  He is a saint in my book and we’re so fortunate to work with so many of these wonderful people.

Elder Davis (Dad)