Local Mennonite follows relief shipment to wartorn Africa
By JILLIAN OVERSTAKE
Intern Staff Writer
On a green mountainside in Burundi, a tiny landlocked country in Western Africa, Maynard Knepp could not find any time to observe the scenery.
Not alone, at least.
"Behind me would always be a dozen boys," Knepp said. "I'd be climbing up the mountain and look behind me and there'd be boys, smiling and following."
But in addition to happy young locals, armed guards protecting Knepp and his three-person team shadowed them wherever they went.
His climb was not one that a typical tourist would take, nor that U.S. officials would recommend. Civil war between Hutus and Tutsis raged up until just three months ago.
The sight that greeted Knepp when he reached the mountaintop was monumental: dozens of people of all ages working to restore the war-scarred land; planting seedlings to replace the trees that were cut down or destroyed during the war that started in 1993 and ended with a cease-fire agreement on Sept. 7.
Knepp, a local author and tree surgeon who lives with his wife Carol Duerksen on a farm between Goessel and Hillsboro, explored the countryside of Africa for six days, following what he calls a "Trail of Meat."
Following canned meat from Hillsboro to an African village, Knepp saw that the food is doing more than filling empty bellies: it's bringing hope, spreading love, battling hunger, rebuilding battle-scarred homes, and ultimately, he hopes, changing the world.
Traveling three continents to reach Burundi, Knepp certainly saw more of the world than expected.
Because there are no direct flights from the U.S. to Burundi, eight days of his two-week journey were spent traveling; first to Germany, then to Ethiopia, and finally to the intended destination.
While reluctant to begin the journey because of a busy schedule full of basketball refereeing, Knepp was encouraged by family and friends to take the trip.
The event ended up being a mountaintop experience.
Knepp returned from his expedition this past Monday, amazed at where a can of meat had taken him.
"To go there physically and see the product we canned in Hillsboro being in Burundi — that was the best part," he said.
Knepp's "Trail of Meat" began in October, when he joined other volunteers to can meat in a mobile unit brought to Hillsboro by the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) which also travels to 33 other cities in the U.S. and Canada annually.
Inside the self-contained unit, volunteers in 2006 boned and canned 672,235 pounds of meat for the hungry, according to the MCC.
Few volunteers from the local community get the opportunity to see the final product put to use. By going to Africa, Knepp has seen how hands from Hillsboro are changing hearts and lives.
When Knepp climbed the mountain to see the tree nursery, he saw people working to earn cans of meat in the Work for Food program sponsored by the Burundi government, the MCC, the Work for Food prgram, and an organization called the Help Channel.
"They'd get paid by the day," Knepp said. "There, a dollar a day is making good money. My team and I figured up the planters are making equal to 80 cents a day."
The people planting seedlings on the mountainside were paid in one-pound cans of meat, a valuable commodity in Burundi, where even Knepp and his team, Tim Friesen, the head of the canning operation, and Shawn Hunter, a videographer who documented the trip, had little more than bread and bananas to sustain them.
Even worse than the lack of food is the quality of water. Most of the clean water used to come from the mountain itself, but without the original growth and vegetation, the water is scarce or filthy.
"There'd be kids taking their bikes or walking to the lake just to get there and drink out of it with three or four cows, too," Knepp said.
The poverty Knepp saw was beyond that of the television commercials urging sponsorship for starving children and poignant pictures in National Geographic.
"I saw a lot of hungry children and a lot of desperate people," said Knepp. "It was numbing. The problem is so much bigger than us as individuals."
Though the desperation is great, Knepp has hope that the program will change peoples' lives, starting with his own. Knepp said his responsibility is to travel the central states, retelling his African adventure and keeping the MCC meat program alive
"I've spent years wondering what my gifts are," he said. "This is what I'm supposed to do — tell the story of what we're doing."
Knepp will use a film documentary put together by the team to inspire the video-age generation to keep the work alive.
