Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
One Sawmill Changed EVERYTHING for Countless People in Congo | Wood World with Glen Chapman
13 Plays1 year ago
🎥 About This Episode: Explore the significant impact of Glen Chapman's initiatives in remote Congolese villages. With only a portable lumber mill, Glen was instrumental in addressing critical lumber shortages that plagued these areas after years of conflict and economic challenges. His approach not only supplied needed wood but also fostered significant economic and educational growth in the community.
👤 Meet Glen Chapman: Glen Chapman has spent over five decades at the forefront of sustainable development and economic improvement in the Congo in Africa. By introducing a portable lumber mill, Glen provided essential materials like wood and spurred a wave of economic activities, encompassing everything from carpentry to boat building, thereby revitalizing local communities.
🌲 Deep Dive into the Heart of Congo: This episode explores Glen Chapman’s pivotal role in mitigating poverty and resource scarcity in the Congo. We discuss how the introduction of the Wood-Mizer sawmill marked a turning point, significantly enhancing local education, housing, and infrastructure.
--- 🌟 About Koval Digital We specialize in delivering high return and quality solutions to support the branding, business development, hiring, and training needs of people and businesses in the wood industry. 🌲 Improving the lives of people in the wood industry globally 🌎
🔗 Connect with Us - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kovaldigital/
🚀 Ready to Elevate Your Digital Presence? Schedule a call with our team and let’s make things happen!
Visit https://kovaldigital.com to get started.
#woodworld #timber #woodindustry #sawmillbusiness #businessmanagement #timberindustry #masstimber #hardwoods
Recommended
Transcript
The Power of Action in Preaching
00:00:00
Speaker
We can preach all we want, but unless we do something that changes people's lives, you know, our preaching is worthless.
Glenn Chapman's Mission in Congo
00:00:08
Speaker
Meet Glenn Chapman, a missionary who spent 50 years in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There was no more lumber.
00:00:14
Speaker
And people didn't have chairs, they didn't have tables, or we don't have electricity. We have a generator. Using a portable lumber mill to tackle dire lumber scarcities in remote villages. A wooden visor could be operated by one person, but the benefit goes to so many people. His vision revolutionized local economies and transformed livelihoods through sustainable development. You know, we said, no, we can't do this. And they said, yeah, we can. If you produce a lumber, we can build it.
00:00:42
Speaker
Let's explore his unique story that showcases how timber can dramatically improve lives.
Interview with Glenn Chapman
00:00:50
Speaker
Today we have Glenn Chapman online here with us. I'm your host. My name is Vadim and we've also got Jake on the line.
00:01:03
Speaker
Glenn, what an incredible story, incredible ministry, and really excited to have the opportunity to have a conversation around your life mission. Thanks for joining us today. It's an honor to be with you today.
00:01:17
Speaker
Jake, so you've known Glenn and you've made the official introduction to me as well. I'd love to hear maybe if you guys can share a little bit of how did you guys meet? You know, I worked at Woodmeiser in marketing for eight years. And that's in my first years when I happened to be organizing an old cabinet that just had all these boxes back in the mail room. And I found a bunch of VHS tapes back in this cabinet. And fortunately it was 2011, 2012. So we still had a VHS.
00:01:47
Speaker
s player in the marketing department. And I found that Glenn had been diligently recording the progress of the, the mission, the school, the sawmill in great detail over many, many years and sending in tapes to Woodmizer. And I'm sure to his mission organization has get some popcorn and watching logs float down rivers and watching. Yeah.
Impact of a Small Lumber Mill on Community
00:02:13
Speaker
pit sawing and boats being created like the Titanic size boat you guys built on the river. There's such a story here about the impact one small lumber mill can have in a community where the lumber usage is not well managed. So we got in contact with you and filmed an interview and made a video that's been up for a while. Missionaries have always had kind of a holistic approach to missions.
00:02:42
Speaker
yes, doing evangelism, doing planting churches, but also being concerned about the health and the education and in the process doing construction and agriculture, quality of life issues. And so since I grew up there, being the child of missionaries, I kind of saw how the other missionaries were working, kind of things that they were involved in,
00:03:12
Speaker
And, uh, so that kind of gave me inspiration to see what, uh, what I could do in my turn, uh, as, as a missionary.
Historical Context: Congo's Lumber Industry
00:03:21
Speaker
You were actually born in the Congo. No, I arrived when I was one years old. Okay. Almost born there. And it was Belgian Congo as a colony back then.
00:03:33
Speaker
a picture for somebody from anywhere in this in this industry or looking at this industry from the outside where why and how did you get involved in the area of wood and more so like how does that fit in together with ministry just one other aspect of that would be what does actually the wood industry look like in pongo starting out in colonial days the belgian colonizers they invested in
00:04:01
Speaker
lumber mills for their construction needs. The Belgians did a lot of construction in Congo, building up the infrastructure. And so they had lumber mills scattered around the country. And so the local people had lumber available to them in the 40s and 50s. But then after independence, when the Belgians had to leave, those companies were not well managed. And so
00:04:30
Speaker
They kind of ran into the ground and then eventually stopped. And so the area that we worked in was a rural area. And the lumber mill that had been supplying to our province of Bandundu was no longer functioning. And so to get lumber, you had to go to the capital city. So Kinshasa, the capital city, is on the Congo River. And the loggers would chop down the rainforest upriver
00:04:59
Speaker
and then float these big rafts of logs down to the city. And they'd bring these logs up on shore. And then they had these big saws that would do the lumber. So if you needed lumber, you had to go to the city and then load up a truck and try to travel on a road that's completely been neglected to try to get lumber back into the interior, which was- And we're talking hundreds of
Challenges in Transport and Infrastructure
00:05:26
Speaker
miles, right? We're talking hundreds of miles, yeah.
00:05:28
Speaker
on these roads that are, you know, in the rainforest, roads that are always getting eroded out. And it's, you know, that if you're a trucker, you're also the road maintenance person. So you're repairing the road as you go along, because the villagers aren't going to do it. The Belgians, they had paid the villagers to maintain the roads. And that was a way of providing employment for people in the interior. But that wasn't happening anymore.
00:05:58
Speaker
And so they weren't working on the roads. And it's your responsibility as a driver then to work on the roads to try to bring these big loads of lumber in for construction projects. Like we had a hospital construction project. And it was always, even though we had trees all around, it was a real problem to get the lumber in for the construction project because you had to go to the city to get the lumber. So that's kind of the context of the 60s and the 70s and then
00:06:29
Speaker
I went to the interior then as a missionary in the 80s. And there was a real problem because all the lumber that people had used to make furniture with back in those days, there was no more lumber. And people didn't have chairs, they didn't have tables, in schools there weren't any desks. So it was a real vacuum of supplies, which created a real identity crisis among the population.
00:06:58
Speaker
when you don't have the basics for your home. And so that's kind of where the vision of a portable lumber mill came.
Partnership with Woodmizer
00:07:08
Speaker
And I don't remember how I heard about Woodmizer. I got connected with Woodmizer and they trained me in how to run an LT25. That was the 90s. There was a missionary that had an exporting business. So he would send containers to Congo and the LT25 fit right in one of those
00:07:29
Speaker
containers, those shipping containers, it fit in perfectly. So it didn't need to take it apart or anything. It just rolled right in and got shipped out to out to Congo. And then to try to get the mill up country to where we lived on those really bad roads, we couldn't tow it. We would never have gone with the high center and the roads, the ruts and all that. And so we took off the wheels and just put the mill in the back of a truck
00:08:00
Speaker
You know, I had to build up 55 gallon drums to get the mill to go in and then drove the mill up to our station called Kekongo. How long of a drive is that actually back in the day? You know, especially with a truck having to take those bumps even slower because of the load. It's not all that far, 150 miles. There may be a truck broken down in the middle of the road. They have to wait to get around. So it could take several days
00:08:28
Speaker
to do that distance. Back before 80s, there was a ferry crossing. There wasn't a bridge over one of the rivers, just a ferry. And so you'd get to the river and there'd be a hundred trucks there waiting to get across. And you have to end up spending the night there at the river with all the mosquitoes waiting for your turn to get across the river. Changed a lot having a bridge, but still pretty difficult.
00:08:53
Speaker
Before we get to the part where the sawmill actually gets to key Congo, can you give paint a little bit of a picture about some of the challenges that people in rural Congo face on a regular basis?
Social and Economic Issues in Congo
00:09:05
Speaker
There's in the 90s, you had the big the war happened. Millions of people died, you know, in the war and because of famine, food scarcity, education. And then I think one of the big ones with the sawmill was vocational skills and opportunities. What are some of these challenges as a missionary that you're
00:09:23
Speaker
that you're facing on a regular basis. Yeah. Um, disease is another challenge that you didn't mention, but, uh, disease, you know, that's the land of Ebola. You have measles that goes through and just wipes out villages. You have sleeping sickness, a lot of, uh, a lot of challenges as far as health goes. And then, and then hunger, uh, you know, an area without refrigeration. Uh, you, you live day by day because you can't store food. You can't save it.
00:09:50
Speaker
for the next day. You've got an increasing population. So you've got a lot of competition for the food. The people are just growing out of being hunters and gatherers and learning how to farm and learning how to raise animals. But a lot of the villagers are still in the hunter-gatherer mode. And so the big animals that they would depend upon are no longer there. So you're reduced to eating
00:10:18
Speaker
insects, and which is really, really common, insects and rodents. Like I mentioned, the Belgians had invested in kind of an infrastructure, in a rural infrastructure, because they realized that people needed to have a living in the interior. The dictator didn't invest in the interior, he invested in the city. And so there was a real rural exodus, people would go to the cities, because that's where the jobs were. Having your own enterprise, it was really difficult.
00:10:48
Speaker
The government also really doesn't encourage private enterprise. They're like wolves. Whenever they see somebody who's doing something positive, then they rush into tax and to make life difficult. We had those difficulties with the lumber mill too. The Congo, the country, is one of the richest countries in the world as far as resources go. It's the rainforest. It's one of the big natural rainforests of the world besides the Amazon just sitting in swamp.
00:11:17
Speaker
in wetland and so we were kind of on the fringes of that. So where we were is grassland and forest. There's been the presence in recent years of the Chinese who are in a great thirst of resources and so they build roads to where the forests are so they can exploit those the timbers and send to other parts of the world so that people don't see much benefit from that but
00:11:44
Speaker
The initial impression can be even negative, right? Like, it would be like saying, oh, yeah, we set up a lumber mill in the Amazon. And because of the public perception, the immediate thought is, oh, no. But when you explain, well, with a woodmizer, not only is it inefficient, it's efficient compared to the big old mills that were available still at the time.
00:12:07
Speaker
But then you can't, I mean, Woodmeisters are famous for being low production machines, right? As far as like the mobile units, it's a one man sawmill. It's not a 50 man sawmill. And you're putting a log, maybe one or two logs through a day, not a hundred logs. And you're being very efficient and thinking through what you are cutting and for why, right?
Sustainable Development with Small-Scale Milling
00:12:32
Speaker
Exactly. And
00:12:34
Speaker
Not only are those big mills, the commercial mills, inefficient, but now we're seeing more and more chainsaws, which are really inefficient. They just go through the logs. Half of the log is wasted in the sawdust in the cut that they do.
00:12:53
Speaker
So that wood miser is just so efficient compared with those other two alternatives, commercial lumber mill and the chainsaws that are coming in. A wood miser could be operated by one person, one or two people, but the benefit goes to so many people. Being able to have lumber that can be used for boat building or furniture making or construction
00:13:22
Speaker
or coffins. It's just it benefits whole community. And the way we looked at it was that the people were benefiting from their own resources. Whereas the big companies, you know, they're, they're furnishing lumber for export or, or for the rich for the city. But but the wood miser is, is there where the people are, where the where the poor are, where the logs are. And so you're placing value
00:13:52
Speaker
on the forest and you're placing value on what that forest can produce for yourselves rather than for exploiting it for others. Running a sawmill is a bit of a science. What was that process like of getting the sawmill up there, getting the locals trained, getting yourself trained, dealing with the local species? We had old carpenters, people that had been sawing logs
00:14:21
Speaker
They knew which woods were good for what purpose. And then running the machine, we put one person in charge of different tasks. So the repetition, they would learn how to do it right, because everybody wanted to get their hands on it. And that wasn't going to work. So we had people that had expertise in one guy who
00:14:51
Speaker
who actually ran the saw, another guy who ran the engine, another guy on the pulley to bring the logs up and align them. So we had different specialties to work on that. We started out just rolling the LT25 to wherever there was a tree. So we chopped down the tree and rolled the mill out, saw there,
00:15:21
Speaker
And, but the land is pretty healing and it was a big effort to transport when you don't have a vehicle to pull the machine with. How many people pushing it to where the log is?
Technical Challenges and Solutions
00:15:32
Speaker
Well, we had a whole army of students who could pull, push the mill and everybody's interested in being there to help out because even the scraps
00:15:46
Speaker
were useful. You know, the first cut with the bark and all, you know, that had a flat surface. And that was pretty useful for to put down on the ground as a table or a place to sit or for their outhouses for walls around the outhouses or chicken coops. And so you had plenty of hangers on who were just there to do a little bit of work and they knew they weren't going to get paid but they'd walk off the
00:16:16
Speaker
with a border or a scrap. And that was important to them. But then eventually you set up the mill on the river, I think, right? That's correct. We rolled it down to the river. So the logs would be cut up river and floated down. And then we'd use a pulley, a winch, and a lot of human force to roll the logs up onto the mill.
00:16:46
Speaker
Are we talking about the Congo River? No, this is a tributary. Okay. Yeah. What would be the closest city now that where this was location where you were? The closest city would be Kengi. That's on the main N1 highway. So we're between the cities of Kengi and Bandundu. Bandundu is the capital of the province. So we were on the Wamba River.
00:17:13
Speaker
The Wamba River runs into the Quango, Quango runs into the Quilu, Quilu into the Kasai, Kasai into the Kwa, and then Kwa into the Congo River. So even though it was- Now you know how to get there, Gary. It was not pretty big. It was not a pretty big river. So where do I take a left, Glenn? Yeah, those logs were larger than the LT-25 could handle. We had to chop off the bark to get it down
00:17:43
Speaker
so that the saw could go over it. Most of the logs, the LT25, could handle. But there were a few. The trunks of the trees were... Monster trees? Monster trees. Yeah. I mean, it looks like from some of these old photographs, you could see that they're basically up to the waist of some of these people, roughly. Oh, yeah. What kind of species were they?
00:18:13
Speaker
We had something called Mulundu, which is the colorful wood, kind of reddish, but hard. It's your hardwood that's good for construction. That was pretty hard to saw. We could do it, but had a high silica content and even rocks, even rocks in the wood. I think that that tree is susceptible to lightning strikes. And whenever lightning would hit that tree, it would,
00:18:43
Speaker
it would make rocks. And so we'd have, that was hard to cut. But the tree that the lumber that we cut the most of is something called pukupuku. And it's a grass growing tree that grows in the swamp. And so it's really easy, you could chop down the tree in the swamp, and then float it out to the river, and then float it down. So, and that's, and it's fast growing. That's pukupuku, that's like our pine.
00:19:13
Speaker
So it makes it easier to work with very functional type lumber. And then we have Wanda. Wanda was used for boats because it flowed. It was highly buoyant. So even if you had a canoe or a boat made out of Wanda, if you fill it up with water, it would still float, it wouldn't sink. And it was kind of fibrous and it lasted for a long time.
00:19:42
Speaker
In the water, it wouldn't rot in the water and then we had another wood alifaki that was good for bridges because it could be around humidity and wouldn't wouldn't rot so we got to learn some of the purposes of the.
00:19:56
Speaker
of the wood so we could decide what wood could be used for different projects. That's incredible. The reason we're asking all these questions and the reason I was super excited to have Jake make the introduction to meet you is because I believe our purpose is greater than just running a business for business sake. And there's an eternal component to what we're
COBOL Agency's Alignment with Chapman's Mission
00:20:19
Speaker
doing. There's a bigger purpose to why. And so for me, our business is called COBOL.
00:20:25
Speaker
And it's an agency that we are serving, specifically the wood sector. Specifically, we're on a mission to improve the lives of the people in the wood industry globally. And I love to explain what we do and how we do it by using a couple of verses. If we look at Genesis chapter 1, verse 28, where God says, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.
00:20:55
Speaker
And I take that word, subdue it quite literally, quite literally. So we're put on this earth to do exactly that. God says, you know, make use of the resource here. I'm really fascinated with your story of how you and God was using you and your ministry specifically with a sawmill in the middle of the Congo to be able to, to be able to minister to people and modern day businesses. How do we combine and achieve both?
00:21:24
Speaker
Uh, and I mean, practically speaking, you're, you're doing, you're doing exactly that. I was training pastors. That was my main job, but the wood mines, one of the things that we were doing on the side to help the students, uh, earn tuition fees in the Bible verses that you mentioned, you know, the Congolese, they would use those verses and interpret them as, Oh, we need to exploit the earth. Uh, but we would.
00:21:55
Speaker
add to those verses, we would add Genesis 2.15, where it says God took man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it. And so the idea is using, but yet managing. Yes. And because the Congolese, their mentality is you have to live for the day.
Teaching Sustainable Resource Management
00:22:22
Speaker
You don't have seasons, you know, in the West,
00:22:24
Speaker
we had the winter to prepare for. And so we would store up because we knew the winter was coming when it would be different. In Congo, there is no winter. So you don't have the anthropological culturally. You don't have the concept of saving up for a season of where there's going to be a change. And so we would tell the people that we are co-creators with God.
00:22:51
Speaker
God creates and we manage his creation because we're going to see things going extinct if we don't do that. The teaching component of the mill was really practical and useful to think about the Earth and the resources that God has given us and to consider, okay, we've got to think about our future and how can we make this mill sustainable so that
00:23:21
Speaker
Our children will also have forests and will also have lumber and will also have food to eat. So we really had a reforestation component that went along with the teaching as well. So we had the teaching and then the practical part. So we would figure out how to plant certain trees. That hardwood that I had mentioned, there are no seeds. So we had to figure out how
00:23:49
Speaker
how we get it to propagate. So we planted lumber trees and fruit trees and trees for firewood, trees for just general reforestation because so much, there was so much erosion and so much abuse of the land. What the young men were doing was they were planting, they decided that they liked planting corn.
00:24:17
Speaker
Well, for a cornfield to work, you need to chop down a new section of forest every time you make a new field. Because after you plant corn, it takes like seven years for the land to replenish itself, to be able to plant corn again in that place. And so the forest was just being raised, just being cut down and burned with their slash and burn method.
00:24:42
Speaker
and all that lumber, all those trees were just going up in smoke. We were just saying, come on, we can make better use of this. We can manage our land a bit better. Fire is good, but we have to manage fire. So many of our trees got burnt just from kids. That's all they do is they play with fire. Wow. Land I'm in an Airbnb because in Northern Thailand, across Southeast Asia, it's the same.
00:25:12
Speaker
it is easier to burn the field than it is to till the field back up, right? So everybody burns the fields across Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand. So we're down at the beach for a couple months because of that air pollution because of this time of year, dry time of year, all the agriculture burning. So I have to bring the family down to the beach because of allergies in the family. Besides, it's just not healthy, but you know all about that too.
00:25:41
Speaker
Yeah, the dry season void. It's really smoking. In the US, North America, someone buys an LT15 or an LT40. They might use it to support a business, to build their own home. There's many such stories. But lumber is pretty readily available, even if it's more expensive than it ever was in North America. So what are then the ripple effects? Maybe you didn't know all the ripple effects that would appear when you first got the mill up there. So how did
00:26:10
Speaker
How did that ripple effects in your community develop of just having this lumber mill available and there? We were starting off from such a deficit of lumber that we were able to meet such a tremendous need in so many different areas.
Infrastructure Improvements and Community Benefits
00:26:30
Speaker
The schools have had no desks for the students. For example, houses were being built with
00:26:40
Speaker
just poles from the forest. And so the roofs would be all crooked. Whenever they put the corrugated aluminum on, the roofs wouldn't hold up very well. And when did your village get electricity for power tools and things like that? Well, we don't have electricity. I mean, we have a generator. I had a- Still? Oh, yeah. Oh, there's no like, no, we're never going to get electricity out there.
00:27:10
Speaker
No way. So much hydropotential. But no, they'll never be power lines. We use solar. We use DC to power up a battery. But like when I would use the sharpener, we always had to have a generator. So you fire up the generator to use the blade sharpener. Yeah, it's pretty remote.
00:27:41
Speaker
It was only in my last years out there, maybe four years ago, that we got a cell phone tower built so that we could make phone calls. It's Congo, just infrastructure just isn't there. Okay, so what did the lumber affect? It affected everything, the homes and the schools and the hospital.
00:28:08
Speaker
and allowed us to do some construction. And not only that, but the villages around benefited. And the neat thing about the Woodmizer mill is it's such a clean cut. So when you have a board, you don't need to spend hours trying to plane it, trying to plane the boards. When you use a chainsaw,
00:28:33
Speaker
to make a board. It's a really rough cut. And it takes lots and lots of planning to be able to make that into a useful piece of lumber to sit on or something. But the woodmizer, the cuts were just so clean. The people really admired that. They really appreciated that. And so since we were on the river, the logs are coming down, well then we would float then lumber down river to some of the other
00:29:03
Speaker
villages that were downriver. The benefits were just tremendous. We couldn't count who all benefited from the lumber mill. I mean, people would boast that, oh, in our village, all the houses have a piece of lumber, you know, that everybody benefited in some way or another from the lumber mill.
00:29:33
Speaker
just even getting just a piece of of wood was something that was useful. Can you elaborate on two stories specifically the time you were on the trail with your bike and you came across a group of ladies in the trail and how the lumber mill got involved in you know the story I'm referring to yeah yeah I was and then and then the big boat can you tell us about the big boat okay I use my bicycle a lot in Congo and
00:30:02
Speaker
you want to get an early start because of the heat of the day. And so we left our key Congo before light and got down to the valley as it was, as it was getting light, but we couldn't get past the trail. We can't, there were people that were stopping us in the trail, not letting us by because a woman was giving birth in the trail. And so I said, well, you know, why didn't you,
00:30:29
Speaker
come to the hospital earlier, why did you wait till the last minute? And they said, well, last night we got to the river, the stream, and we weren't able to cross because the bridge was so bad, so rickety that we couldn't cross. We had to wait till it started to get light before we had the courage to go across those sticks. So I said, you know, all it would take is two logs and we could saw the lumber to build a bridge.
00:30:58
Speaker
And so they sent us two logs and we started up. And then the picture that I inserted, that last one is the bridge that we built. So we called all the villages together and they all carried a piece of lumber down to that stream. And yeah, that one there. Yeah, they all carried a piece and then we just hammered it together right there. And that bridge lasted for years and years,
00:31:28
Speaker
uh wood is is valuable and um you know the board started to disappear and people would when they noticed it was starting to disappear they would well so the the boards ended up in people's houses and and uh they eventually didn't have a bridge so we may have built maybe three wood bridges at that site because it was such a a well-traveled place now i've got a um the last bridge we built was uh was cement and stone so um
00:31:58
Speaker
that'll hopefully last a little bit longer. And then the end of the story was the boat. So we had a guy come up from the Colombo River who wanted to have a boat built. Let's see. He had some builders with him and they started designing how big it was. And we said, no, we can't do this. And they said, yeah, we can. If you produce a lumber, we can build it.
00:32:26
Speaker
And so they built this boat up on up on the bank like 15 feet from the from the water level because it was a flat area there. And then they. But they needed it to go into the water and we needed a lot of a lot of strong men to to push the boat into the water. So the guy said, OK, I'm going to be putting on some big pots of coffee.
00:32:55
Speaker
If you want to come down and help, you can drink some coffee, because they always put lots of sugar in. So you feel like when you've drunk a cup of coffee, you've really gotten your energy. And so all the youth of Kekanga went down there, and we started pushing it. We put logs underneath it to try to make it roll. And little by little, it was going little by little, little by little. And then when it got to the edge,
00:33:25
Speaker
Then gravity started taking it. And then after a little bit, it just, it just went by itself. It just, it just, you know, like when these, they launched these boats that you see from these factories, it just went right in. And everybody was so surprised to see it go into the water. And we really didn't think that we were able to be able to get the boat into the water, but we really did. And everybody was happy and celebrating when it was a,
00:33:53
Speaker
It was a memorable experience for everybody. But that boat went on to the Condole River. So Glenn, you became a boat builder missionary as well.
Chapman's Evangelism and Logistical Challenges
00:34:03
Speaker
You're like an all around carpenter here with the sawmill now. Well, we put the first boat on that, the first motorized boat on that river. Actually, before the sawmill arrived, I had to get a boat built, but I had to buy the lumber in Kinshasa. And then we took
00:34:24
Speaker
the lumber by truck to a river that's between Kinshasa and Kikango. And then on a sandbar, these guys built the boat. And then I had to ferry it from that river all the way up to Kikango. That was a three-day ride on the rivers to get back up to Kikango. So the first boat was lumber that was not our lumber, but that we had bought in the city. And so that
00:34:54
Speaker
that kind of gave me incentive to have a lumber mill and to kind of see what a lumber mill could do for me. What were the purposes for the boat that you guys had built? I was doing evangelism and I was doing evangelism with audio visual. And so we could carry the fragile equipment to villages that had roads
00:35:24
Speaker
There are a lot of villages where there weren't roads, there were villages along the rivers. And so the idea was to have a boat where I could take my audio visual equipment to the villages. During the war, we had soldiers assigned to our station because there was an airstrip. And the fear was that we, the foreigners, were going to be having an airplane come
00:35:48
Speaker
Bringing ammunition and weapons and mercenaries and that sort of thing. So they dropped off a platoon of troops To live on the station with us and then as the war was coming to a close or things were changing or something I got government orders orders from the government to move the soldiers to move the troops and the troops had they didn't get paid and so they were going they had been collecting corn and peanuts and maniac from the villagers and
00:36:18
Speaker
And they justified it as being their own salary. So not only did I have to transport the troops, but also all their loot that they've been accumulating for people. Well, um, the boat wasn't big enough for all of their needs, but still I had to spend two days with the troops and their families, the camp followers to get them up to the, up to the main road. Yeah, that was pretty great.
00:36:46
Speaker
You weren't you weren't rowing this boat. This is probably a motor. I had a 25 horsepower motor. So I had to order gasoline by the barrels, because there weren't any gas stations around. So we would have to scrounge in the capital to find 55 gallon drums, and then fill them with with gasoline and truck them up to key Congo where we could use fuel.
00:37:10
Speaker
Well, you're, you're quite an adventurous man, having done all that. So many adventures that you'd kind of take for granted, right? Like, Oh, of course you would feel up a Woodmizer or of course you have a motor on a, on a boat. That's wild. Yeah. Those opportunities presented themselves. You know, they, each term, each term, we kind of did something new. First one term, it was audio visual. And then we added the boat for the audio visual and then the Woodmizer came along and then the next term.
00:37:39
Speaker
Well, we even did, I flew an ultralight so that I could get that fragile audio visual equipment inland farther because on the back of a motorcycle, it would bump and be fragile. So I used an ultralight for eight years and I could land on a soccer field, set up the king size sheet on a soccer field and project and then fly back home in the morning.
00:38:03
Speaker
Glenn, quickly, what is it that you actually used that equipment for? What was the message? How did you communicate? What language were you speaking? Probably wasn't English. And so depending upon what village we would go to, we would use the appropriate Campus Crusade Jesus film. Then we had films on health, like HIV AIDS, Congolese music videos. I mean, it was only the Jesus film that was in the local language. The others were in English or in French. So I'd sit there with a microphone
00:38:31
Speaker
And I do a running translation of the dialogue into a language that they could understand. But that was really fun. What languages were you speaking then, Glenn? In Congo, you have to be not bilingual, but multilingual. French is the language of education. So you use French in school. Then if you have to, or you're confronted by the government officials, then you use Lingala. That was the language of the dictator.
00:38:57
Speaker
and anybody who's tough and anybody who's in the government, anybody who wants to be assertive has to use Lingala. And then the tribal in our province, there was a trade language called Kituba, which everybody knew could get along in. And then you had your tribal languages. So we had Kimballa and Kiyaka and Kitake were the tribal languages in our area. So the different villages would have a
00:39:27
Speaker
a different tribal language depending upon the majority tribe in that area. So there's one language in our area that I have no clue what they're talking about, what they're saying. So the Congo, people migrated from the south and from the north, and so the tribes that migrated from the north from Gabon, Cameroon, and came to that area, I don't have a clue of what they're saying, but the tribes that migrated from the south kind of are similar
00:39:57
Speaker
And I, and, uh, I can, I can even fake some languages without even knowing them, but, but that's, that's, you know, that's because of growing up out there, growing up and having friends. And, you know, you just naturally as kids, you, you learn that it wasn't any big effort to learn the languages out there because as a child, it was a real advantage. Glenn, I'd like to get your commentary, share the context, what's going on in these pictures. So the one on the top right there.
00:40:24
Speaker
was one of my earliest pictures that I brought back to the states to show the churches of the need for sawing lumber because that's how they were doing it. They had that they would dig a pit under a log and a guy the guy would be one guy would be in the bottom the other guy on the top and they try to follow a line and make boards so you know they they took a long time like one one log like that would take a whole month
00:40:54
Speaker
to do, whereas with the visor, it'd take an hour to get that volume of lumber.
Efficiency and Community Gatherings
00:41:01
Speaker
Was sod with the LT15, and that was actually in our yard. We chopped down a tree in our yard, and it's just demonstrating all the lumber that came out of the one log. Would you be using the pieces just like they are, or continue to rip them down further?
00:41:24
Speaker
No, we wouldn't rip them further. We'd use them like that. That would make a good bench. Carpenters would cut them up for the size chairs that they wanted or tables. The one where we're all sitting down there, that would have been a Christmas dinner. We had all the workers join us for dinner. And we used one of the logs that was on the mill as our Christmas table.
00:41:51
Speaker
Glenn, what were you guys eating? What is the typical food that you eat? Well, for Christmas, Christmas and New Year's would be the only time of the year that we'd have beef. We'd kill a cow, either Christmas or New Year's. And that would be a big, you could kill one cow and divide it up and everybody would get the whole, every family would get a little piece that they could put in the pot and would make a nice sauce.
00:42:20
Speaker
Otherwise, there was fish from the river. There was small game around. People raised goats and chickens. We raised rabbits. But protein is, you don't eat protein every day. We had canned food like sardines and corned beef because we couldn't get very much protein. But the people would eat manioc, cassava, and the greens and the root.
00:42:51
Speaker
that'd be your staple, mix in some caterpillars and some crickets and then it would be highly nutritious. Then the canoe with the logs. So the puku-puku is really floatable. And so you could make these puku-puku rafts on either side of the canoe and float down the river for wherever. And then the guy on the left is the boat builder.
00:43:20
Speaker
So you can see kind of the reddish wood behind him. That would be the mouludu, the hardwood. That's kind of the reddish color. And that was a strong wood, but it wasn't floatable. If it would sink, it would go to the bottom. Those logs had to be lashed to another log that was floatable to come down the river. One year we were in the States,
00:43:47
Speaker
We had our neighbor boys sleep in the storehouse in our yard. And it was kind of overflow from their house. And then we came back to Congo and they were still living in that house. And I took the carriage part of the old LT25 off of our porch and put it next to the shed, to store it next to the shed. And then a tree fell down on the shed
00:44:17
Speaker
while the guys were sleeping in it. And that Woodmizer carriage saved the guys. Kept that log from coming down to where their bed was. Wow. Man, if if they had died in that house, that would have been the end of our career. You know, we would have been accused of being the sorcerers or whatever caused that
00:44:42
Speaker
cause of that problem. But that Wood-Mizer, that even though it wasn't working, it saved our career and saved people's lives. People would come by and just shake their heads and say, God is living. God is alive to have people walk out of that house.
Reflections on Training and Future Plans
00:45:01
Speaker
If you had an opportunity now to go back in time, start the Sawmill Project again from scratch, what would you do differently knowing what you do now?
00:45:12
Speaker
I would give, I would have maybe multiple people learning the different jobs. Rather than having one mechanic always doing the mechanics, have two or three that would be trained on the machine and have two or three saw years. We ran into a problem at one time where the mechanic would introduce
00:45:41
Speaker
problems into the engine so that he would be called upon to fix it. So he knew what was wrong and he wanted to show off how good he was by diagnosing it and fixing it. Maybe just a little bit more oversight on my part. I was busy teaching and other things to do and so I really left a lot of the work to the Congolese and I could have maybe had more oversight over
00:46:11
Speaker
some of the management issues. And you're now retired and you live in Santa Cruz where my parents grew up. Wow. Yeah. My dad's from Aptos. My mom's from Scotts Valley. Wow. Yeah. My grandmother still lives in Santa Cruz. So next time I visit, I'll be sure to visit you as well. I missed you by a few months last time when I was visiting her because you had just moved back.
00:46:40
Speaker
But you're actually going back to the Congo this year, correct? I'm looking at that possibility. There's some real tribal issues since we've left. There's been real bad attacks on tribes. There's unrest. There's instability. And so we're kind of looking at the security situation. But I'd like to be able to go back maybe in August.
00:47:05
Speaker
The LT15 wasn't working when I left. There were some adjustments I wasn't able to make. Since we've been back, they asked for blades and they asked for belts. And so I was able to send out blades and belts to them. And they recently sent pictures of wood that they're cutting. So after all these years, the LT15, we set out in 208. It started working 208.
00:47:33
Speaker
Uh, so now it's still, it's still functioning, you know, and it's been in the forest. It's been in the swamp. It's been all over the place. And, uh, that's one durable, uh, piece of equipment. If it's still, still functioning. I know we need to wrap up with you, but, uh, Badeem, if there are any other questions you'd like to ask, um, I really feel like it's so nice to see you again and thank you for being so generous over the years with footage and your time and
00:48:02
Speaker
sharing because it's it's really inspiring and it's it's cool to see uh learn from your experience this is really fun for me because i don't get much opportunity to be able to tell my stories for people to people just can't relate to when i tell missionary stories uh about about anything that we did and so for for you guys to can relate to wood and working with wood and those challenges it's it's really fun it's fun for me to relive those uh
00:48:32
Speaker
Memories, we need to write a book. On that, related to that, my father-in-law Glenn was born in Yangon, Burma in the 50s and grew up in Northern Burma for all of his childhood. Jungle Boy, yeah, until he was 20. Communist takeovers, all kinds of big stories. But something special that he does is that there are books written about their family's adventures, but he's taken to writing just a chapter a week
00:49:01
Speaker
Oh, just a memory, you know, his pet monkey, he has a chapter about his pet monkey when he was 11, you know, he has a chapter about, you know, going up and eating, collecting beehive larva, you know, taking it back to the village to eat. And the kids love it. And it's a little outlet for him, he can just relive those those moments. And he's not trying to write a big story
Integrating Faith with Action
00:49:26
Speaker
or something like that. But it's just
00:49:28
Speaker
memories, right? And my kids absolutely love it. He'll read them a chapter and when he has a new one. So I encourage you to do that. I'm just really encouraged by what you've said so far. And maybe kind of a last question for you, Glenn, is what advice do you have for others looking to really use what God has given them to do similar things in the ways that you combine, you know, both ministry and economic development and using the wood products industry like
00:49:58
Speaker
Yeah, we can preach all we want, but unless we do something that changes people's lives, our preaching is worthless. It's faith and it's works. And if we have the capability of helping to promote the abundant life that Christ has to offer, then that's what we should be about, particularly when it comes to
00:50:26
Speaker
them being able to access their own resources, giving them tools to be able to provide a better living for themselves. So for us, it was just really rewarding to be able to live out the gospel, to make our ministry good news to the people and good news that touched so many aspects of their lives. I think that your particular message is very unique
00:50:55
Speaker
There were many really interesting things that you and your family got to experience. It's a very overlooked message for sustainability and the use of resources in countries where their governments and for various reasons have made it really difficult for people to benefit from in a sustainable way. This is a perfect example of the impact that can be had in
00:51:29
Speaker
Thank you so much for our conversation, for sharing your story and sharing stories that are funny and those that are more grounded and maybe hard to hear, you know, us living in this side of the world where we're not used to, like you said, we can't relate necessarily to the daily struggles that you had to go through and the things you and the family and others. But thank you so much again for sharing those stories and thank you for the work you've done, admiring you, Glenn, and
00:51:52
Speaker
with relatively small effort. I mean, relatively small effort.
00:51:57
Speaker
ministry you've done. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the Wood World Podcast. Thank you for letting me relive those memories, sweet memories. Absolutely.