Making an Impact: Congo

(right) Tom Christy, Geoprobe® Vice-President, and Debo Ngbangadia, a Congolese technician and Tom’s friend, prepare for the day-long, 400 km motorcycle ride from Karawa to Wasolo in the Congo. Tom and son, Joel, member of the Geoprobe® Assembly team, were back in the Ubangi in 2005 for some repair projects. “There were 3 of us on two bikes. The road was rough, but the bikes were better than a 2-day truck ride!” Tom said. Tom first took his family to Wasolo in 1985 and “never imagined that this would become a regular vacation stop for me. On this last trip I found myself working beside the sons of men I had worked

with two decades ago. It was also a big deal in the village that my son, Joel, now 23, came back to help. Everybody in the village remembered him as a little kid with a pellet gun that was pretty hard on the pigeons and hornbills! And now he returns, a grown man skilled in all manner of work,” Tom said. Tom and Joel worked on access roads from the surrounding villages, started up a new saw mill, and spent a lot of time on the community’s water well. A single, hand-pump well supplies water to the entire community, even the hospital, and is in use around the clock (left).“We had drilled a spare well in 1987 but failed to adequately protect the casing riser, and the village kids broke off the cap and dropped all manner of mango seeds and sticks down the casing!” (below) Joel takes his turn cutting a log for the new saw mill using a local variety axe made from

the leaf spring of a truck. Debo (in the John Deere cap which was a gift from John Robb, Geoprobe® Fabrication Manager) watches the progress. In 1997, Debo spent several months at Geoprobe Systems® in Kansas and was still able to name half of the Geoprobe employees that he’d met. “One of the best parts of our trip was seeing Debo at work, training the other guys, explaining how to manage the mill and encouraging people,” Tom added.