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Riverside Farm Institute

The Grow to Give Podcast

Rebecca Eller

Beaver Eller

Craig Harding

Alicia Harding

Joel Slade

Cast Down, but Not Destroy

Hi, my name is Joel Slade and I would like to welcome you to the Grow2Give podcast.

This podcast is dedicated to sharing the impact that the Riverside Farm Institute is having here in our local community in Zambia and beyond.

Here we are in the Nott studio this morning and I'm joined by Craig, Alicia, Beaver and Rebecca.

Awesome, so do you just want to give a brief introduction as to who we've got here with us this morning?

I'm Craig, I'm the Executive Director here at Riverside.

I'm Beaver Eller, working with the Wellness Center and Bush Clinics.

Awesome guys, thank you so much for joining me this morning.

And we're going to be sharing some highlights and some low lights from our time on Crocodile Island.

So to kick things off Craig I'd love to hear from you as to the vision of the project up there and what yeah what what the team was doing and how that came about.

Yeah, so 1 of the things we've looked at is, you know, many people ask, you're at Riverside, you're in a country with more than a million Adventists, what are you still doing there?

And I think the inspiration for a lot of what we do actually comes a bit from maybe Robert Moffat and later David Livingston, where they said, you know, we've seen the smoke from a thousand campfires in villages who've never heard the gospel.

And even though you have this kind of a population, There are so many villages, literally thousands across the country that have no real impact on the gospel whatsoever.

And so we've been seeking to find and reach out to those people that have not heard across the country.

Why does Riverside go 16 hours, 18 hours from where we are?

So 3 years ago or so, we began to do student crusades, student evangelism with our evangelism students, our wellness students and a team from Riverside on the shores of Lake Tanganyika on the northern edge of Zambia.

Yeah well so logistically how many people are we moving up to this region and yeah what does that look like?

Yeah it's a little bit like a wagon train of sorts.

We had about 30, what, I think 36 or so people in the student team.

So it looks like a 5 ton covered canter with a trailer going up to the to the lake with all the supplies I think well maybe 2 people in that vehicle and then the rest on public transport buses so which is quite a an adventure of its own because it's like 2 bathroom stops in 18 hours and you know just a whole a whole thing so it's quite the the endeavor to get everything just to the location then from there you've got yeah you've got the boat to the island because it's on crocodile Island and so you're getting a boat, negotiating the boat, seeing if the boat will show up in the same day that you ordered the boat and all of those kind of ventures, sleeping in the church while you're waiting for the boat to come, the church on the mainland where the main church is and so yeah quite a bit of logistics lots of food lots of tents it's 3 different sites that we were going to do on the island and so you have literally 3 different sets of cooking stuff 3 different sets of food 3 different sets of tents medical equipment dental equipment dental team as well so yeah it's a it's a logistical endeavor yeah no no question at all So we were in a later party that was going up to join the team that had already been running for a couple of weeks at this stage.

We'd already loaded the vehicle the day before.

3 car convoy, 3 Land Cruisers heading up there.

And yeah, I remember that feeling of pulling out of the gates at 2.30 a.m.

Or yeah I was alright actually I just arrived in country from Australia and so I was still adjusting to the time zone so that was actually kind of when I'd be waking up naturally in Australia anyway but yeah setting off in the dark up to this unknown foreign land, it was definitely a bit of an adventure.

So talk us through, yeah, just how that little little journey went as we started off there.

Yeah, it's 1 of my favorite things to do is to drive at night.

It sounds strange, but with the Land Cruisers, with the big LED light bar, if you can kick those on.

And the truth is you can see the potholes, you can see anyone on the road.

And there aren't many people on the road, fortunately, by 2 a.m.

And so, we took off, got through Lusaka, the capital city, heading north.

And as it started to get dark, or the dusk or the dawn beginning to come, transitioning, we continued going north.

And as we're going along at some point, I'm starting to get a little sleepy.

I'm pretty good until you know sometime around 3 4 a.m And then that period you know, it starts to get get a little rough And so it got past that and we're driving and at 1 point I'm I'm cruising along.

I must have been going 100 kilometers or something and all of a sudden this guy just comes out of nowhere from behind a bus right into the road not looking at all and I mean we swerved jerked and just barely missed the guy maybe by a couple of inches and you know at that point I had no issue of sleep at all for a long time.

But you just know how close you are to, certainly the guy would have been killed in all likelihood.

And then your life is going to be completely confused in relation to the program of evangelism because you're going to be going to police and hospital and funerals and you just have this whole human impact.

And so you're just so thankful that as close as that was, that was able to be avoided.

But it shows you some of the few risks among the many potholes and trucks and police checkpoints that you deal with in those kind of things.

I loved how you said it was a 16-hour drive to the north of the country.

I remember we did 14 hours on the road on the first day.

Look, Google Maps doesn't even say 16 hours.

And then you're dealing with these roads just to give some some indication so you've got a normal looking road you'd be doing yeah 40 to 60 miles an hour on normally but then you've got a meter and a half of potholes eating into the sides of the road and you've got oncoming buses oncoming trucks and everyone's fighting for that little bit of bitumen that's left there or tarmac in the middle.

And so yeah it can be quite hairy so that was definitely 1 of the more exciting 14-hour drives of my life the first day.

So we arrived there in a town up towards the north of the country, overnighted and then set off again early the next morning.

So yeah, we did 1 last grocery stop and set off on our last stretch to Lake Tanganyika.

Yeah do you want to talk us through what happened next Craig because I know we ran into some more more problems there.

Yeah so you're going along and you know every year that we go we add extra tools to the Land Cruiser because you know the year before you know it's just their roads are so rough so we had you know lug nuts and all these extra things we had added and extra tools and we're going along the road about an hour from Imbala which is is the more the main small main towns that you're gonna turn off to get to go to the lake from.

And all of a sudden we hit a pothole and I hear this, rrrrrrrrr.

So I'm like, but I didn't know it was in the engine at that point, just in the vehicle.

So I like pull over, the other Land Cruiser pulls over, the other 2 Land Cruisers pull over, and I'm thinking, we have a problem.

So we get under the Land Cruiser, start looking, and I'm thinking, oh, it's the drive shaft has sheared.

So we start taking the drive shaft apart, pull it off, sure enough looks like there's a problem.

Not completely sheared but it didn't look right.

Get it off, start the engine back up and the sound is still there and it's very much in the engine itself.

And so it's like okay this is gonna be a problem.

So none of the things we brought with us is gonna fix this problem.

I was gonna go ahead and stay with the vehicle while we sent 1 of our teams from Riverside for a, yeah, healthy 14 hours to come and bring an engine and tools to replace the engine on the side of the road.

So it wasn't the adventure that I had in mind but everyone can continue on to the lake, do the evangelism program, get to the area And so that's kind of where I was left off with water and food and a nice solar panel and a battery to charge my stuff.

In the middle of nowhere on the side of the road.

Yep, so Rebecca, Alicia, we loaded into the 2 remaining vehicles and set off on our way to finish the journey.

Alicia, do you want to tell us what that next leg looked like for us?

I think we were really busy talking about ministry ideas and mission work and just goals and dreams for work here at Riverside.

But yes, at 1 point, things shifted very quickly and I remember just out of nowhere realizing our vehicle was going out of control.

Yeah, so we dropped behind the other vehicle there and we came up over a rise and were just able to see them over the other side of the valley and then looking down realized that it was quite a sharp corner coming up.

I think you made some sort of verbal expression of it.

I don't know There was some sort of verbal recognition of that.

I just recognized we were heading toward the side of the mountain or hill, whatever, and I just saw that's where we're heading.

And it's so weird looking back because when I think about my place in that situation it was so slow like I feel like I was so hyper aware of every millisecond leading up to that impact and being so aware of it approaching and bracing myself getting ready for that impact and thinking, how bad is this gonna be?

I didn't even have time to turn around or really tell the kids anything or check on them.

It was just, it's coming, brace myself, and then boom, we hit.

And as I remember it, there was an impact on the driver's side so I feel like I kind of fell towards you at first thinking maybe that was gonna be it but then just as quickly we were rolling to the left and and of course my mind is still just kind of in brace mode of like what's coming next, how is this gonna end?

And then it was all confusion from there.

I don't think I remember knowing what was happening until we stopped and then when the vehicle stopped I remember turning around immediately to check on the kids and everything was black.

I just felt like I couldn't see anything.

I think it was just the cloud of dust encircling the whole vehicle and blocking the light.

I mean it was just also the shock in my mind of trying to process what was going on.

But I turned around and look at the kids and I didn't see anything.

It was just silent just for like half a second and then all of a sudden we heard the boys screaming and crying and some of them were screaming Winston and when he emerged we saw he was just covered in blood and the boys were crying and they also had blood on themselves from their impact and that was a really scary moment.

So our vehicle ended up turning over onto its side and sliding across the road for several meters there before coming to a standstill because the wheel grabbed in the ditch on the other side of the road and brought us back upright.

And so that cloud of dust that we'd picked up from the vehicle dragging along the road.

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Cast Down, but Not Destroy

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Cast Down, but Not Destroy

1h 9m

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