August 7, 2006

Bluffton Dentist, Wife, Others Visit African Country to Teach Blacksmithing, More

By JUSTIN PEEPER

Nestled in the African jungle about 300 miles south of the equator in the Democratic Republic of the Congo lies the village of Bulape, population 20,000.

There is no running water.

There is no electricity.

There is one running vehicle in the hot, 100-percent humidity tropical environment: an old Toyota Land Rover that has been converted into an ambulance.

The primary form of communication with the outside world: e-mail.

Because of past turmoil, the potential for unrest, national election challenges, periodic fighting in the northeast, and more, the U.S. State Department warns travelers against visiting the African country that is about one-fourth the size of the United States.

Dr. Rob Evans, 57, a Bluffton dentist, was leery last year when first asked to travel to the Third World country with a non-profit organization to teach a hobby he has practiced for 24 years: blacksmithing.

“I agonized over this,” he said. “Then I found out my wife wanted to go and I really agonized over this because we have two kids.”

“The Congo is on the State Department’s do-not-travel list. It’s like the third-most dangerous place to go in the world according to the State Department.”

Evans researched traveling to the African nation for safety assurances, but it was Woody Collins’ past experience that convinced him to make the trip.

Collins, president of the Indianapolis-based non-profit organization Congo Helping Hands Inc., had been to Bulape five times in the last five years.

“He’s never had a problem,” Evans said. “He knew people there and he was well connected in the Congo.”

“I thought, ‘OK, we’ll go for it.’”

Evans, his wife Therese, Mark Thomas of Markle, also a blacksmith, Collins, and Collins’ daughter LaToya flew to Africa on June 9 and spent two weeks in the Bulape village, located in the Kasai Occidental province of central Congo, Africa.

“Once we touched down in Bulape, I was never nervous; I was never threatened,” Evans said. “I felt perfectly secure, just as if I were sitting here in Bluffton. I don’t think those people would have let anything happen to us. They couldn’t have been any nicer.”

A Year of Planning

Planning for the Bulape trip had actually begun in the summer of 2005, but those details and much more would change over the course of the next year.

When officials from Congo Helping Hands Inc. asked Evans to go on the trip, he assumed it was for dentistry work. Evans has been a dentist in Bluffton for 31 years and has visited Honduras to do dentistry work.

Villagers in Bulape had learned about carpentry, brick making and masonry, but they had not mastered blacksmithing, which they regarded as a primary technology, Evans said.

Blacksmithing is a hot trade in developing nations because it is a basic industry that is sustainable. Officials from Congo Helping Hands Inc. wanted Evans to share his blacksmithing skills with villagers.

“I thought, ‘Yeah, what a challenge. Why not?’” Evans said.

The initial plan was for Evans to teach blacksmithing at a technical high school to a group of students and a teacher so that when he left the skills would carry on.

Then the first of many challenges arose.

“They told me whatever you plan to use, you have to take with you,” he said. “There are no Wal-Marts; there are no Lowe’s. There is really not much of anything.”

Blacksmithing supplies, which are often heavy, can be expensive to buy and difficult to find even around here, Evans said.

Evans spent all summer in 2005 researching and developing a Third World blacksmithing unit, complete with forges, bellows and anvils, basic blacksmithing tools.

“The whole concept behind it was that this blacksmithing unit could be put together from scrap and junk that would be available to Third World countries,” Evans said.

Evans compiled fuel, coal, charcoal and scrap steel — a complete set of supplies — and shipped it to Bulape in January 2006.

He would find out a few months later, however, that the freight of supplies that cost $500 to ship never arrived.

In the meantime, Evans continued preparing for the upcoming trip. He spent all winter creating 15 lessons to teach about basic blacksmithing. He even transformed the lessons into step-by-step pictures with no written language.

As spring rolled around, the Democratic Republic of the Congo was supposed to hold elections in March 2006, three months before Evans was expected to depart for Africa.

“We thought the election would be over and things would be settled down in June,” he said. “Well, the election didn’t happen in March.”

Instead, it was moved back to June 2006 — the same time Evans’ small group would be there.

“Tentatively we kept it on and as luck would have it they moved the elections to July 30,” Evans said. “We all breathed a sigh of relief.”

Now into March, two months had passed since Evans mailed his blacksmithing freight to Africa and he decided to e-mail the village to see if it had arrived.

“No, we haven’t seen it. This is the Congo. Anything can happen,” was the reply Evans received.

Evans later learned that his supplies arrived in South Africa. The Congo’s port had been closed because of a strike when the trans-Atlantic steamer arrived, so it went to the next port to unload: South Africa.

“Who knows if it will ever get there,” Evans joked.

With just three months until the trip, Evans had to develop a new plan. Working with Thomas, they decided to make a blacksmith shop of appropriate technology that would fit in trunks they could bring on the plane.

Air France said Evans and Thomas could each bring two footlocker-size trunks weighing up to 70 pounds a piece.

The two scurried to make a simplified blacksmith shop.

They constructed anvils out of pieces of railroad rail called stake anvils. These stake anvils weighed five pounds instead of 150 pounds like the ones they had mailed.

Evans had built blowers out of 55-gallon oil drums and sent to the Congo, but since they didn’t arrive, he and Thomas constructed a wooden blower with a hand crank. It involved a bicycle wheel and wooden blower housing with little sheet metal paddles.

Using e-mail, Evans arranged for charcoal to be in the village when he arrived because coal is not available in the Congo. Charcoal, an alternative to coal, is another basic need for the blacksmithing process.

They also built other supplies they would need to teach basic blacksmithing, and the Indiana Blacksmithing Association donated materials.

“We had appropriate technology for a complete blacksmith’s shop that fit into four footlockers,” Evans said. “I was impressed because I didn’t think we could do it.”

An African Adventure

After departing from Indianapolis on June 9, the group arrived in the Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

They stayed at the Methodist Presbyterian Hostel.

“It was an island of sanity in a sea of chaos,” Evans said. “You just can’t imagine what Kinshasa is like.”

The city has electricity because of two hydroelectric plants on the Congo River, but it tends to go out without warning, Evans said. It is similar in size to New York City with eight to nine million residents, but Evans questioned those numbers.

“I can’t imagine how anybody could have any idea of how many people live there because it’s shoulder to shoulder,” he said. “There is garbage burning in the streets. There are no street lights. There are four stop lights in the capital city and most of the time they didn’t work well and when they did work nobody paid any attention.”

“How many times I thought we were going to get killed in traffic accidents I can’t even tell you. It’s just complete and utter chaos.”

The following day, they took a flight to Bulape. After overflying the air strip three times because children and adults were on it, they landed to open arms and greetings.

“It was like being a rock star,” Evans said. “We were getting hugs and we were shaking hands. They made you feel very welcome.”

“We were met with open arms, literally.”

The village’s lone vehicle — the Land Rover-turned-ambulance — took them to their lodging.

Bulape, where 50 percent of the population is 15 years old or younger, is situated on a plateau, and life is very basic, Evans said.

One of the sights that most amazed Evans was how the young women brought water to the village since there was no running water.

They walked two miles outside the village and then went down 200 feet to a river valley in search of little springs that would bubble up water in the dried-up river beds.

“They’d take a sauce pan and pour it into a five-gallon jug,” he said. “Then somebody would have to help them pick the five-gallon jug up and sit it on their head and they would walk up the 220 vertical feet and 21⁄2 miles to town. They did it three times a day. It was very much a human pipeline that kept that village alive.”

“If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

Evans was most surprised to see that some of the residents had cell phones that occasionally worked.

“They are within 26 miles of a cell phone tower,” he said. “If you stand in the right place of the village at the right time of the day you can sort of get a signal. Everything has to be lined up right.”

Another Change of Plans

As Evans and the others got settled in, he learned of another big change of plans.

Evans and Thomas had prepared to teach blacksmithing to a group of high school students and an instructor. They had designed their lessons for an audience with no prior experience.

However, plans changed again and they were now asked to conduct in-services for the village’s 10 professional blacksmiths.

They quickly modified their plans and taught the villagers several skills over a two-week period, such as how to make hammers and tongs.

“Similar to most Americans, they thought hammers and tongs had to come out of a factory,” Evans said.

Evans and Thomas also taught elementary heat-treating techniques, standard blacksmithing, how to make a hoe, elementary chain saw techniques and more.

The villagers always caught on very quickly and often built on the lessons, Evans said.

“They would look at it and say, ‘Yeah, of course,’” he said. “We learned a lot from them and they learned a lot from us.”

Evans also passed out copies of the blacksmithing curriculum he had developed.

“That was a big hit,” he said. “They loved it.”

While Evans and Thomas were busy sharing ideas with the villagers, Evans’ wife Therese was occupied teaching a process known as drip irrigation.

Drip irrigation involves a long string of hose and a five-gallon bucket.

“You take a five-gallon bucket and you put a nipple on the bottom of the bucket and you hook it up to the hose and string it along your plants and you punch a hole at each plant,” Evans said.

Therese brought seeds from the Moringa Tree, also known as the Miracle Tree, to plant in Bulape. The tree, which looks like a bush, matures in only nine months. The entire tree is edible, Evans said.

The tree will be especially beneficial to the villager’s diets because it is a good source of vitamins, minerals and carbohydrates, Evans said.

In the little free time Evans had, he visited the village’s lone hospital to see the dental department. Much to his surprise, the dental department had only extracted three or four teeth and wired three to four broken jaws last year.

“That was it for the dental department for the whole year,” he said. “If I had gone as a dentist, I would have wasted my time.”

The group returned to the United States on June 26. Evans said it was a great experience and that he would go again given the chance.

“I fell in love with Africa and the African people,” he said.

jdpeeper2@hotmail.com

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