Back in 2022, Bob Giesbrecht and Randy Reimer travelled to Cavango, Angola, with Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) to construct an airstrip that would give locals better access to essential supplies and healthcare. Knowing how much of a difference it made in many peoples’ lives, they returned earlier this year to offer further aid.
Giesbrecht and Reimer grew up on the same Steinbach street. Little did they know that their friendship, and the games they played as children, would one day provide a lifeline for tens of thousands of people half a world away.
“When we were five or six years old, we were building a lot of roads in the sandbox,” Reimer recalls. “That’s where we got a lot of experience.”
It was this experience that eventually put Reimer at the head of Steinbach’s Public Works department, while Giesbrecht succeeded his father as the owner of Diamond Construction. Successful in their careers, they were faced with a rather different kind of building project when Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) came calling in 2022.
“I’ve been a pilot since I was 20-years-old, and I have extensive aviation experience,” Giesbrecht explains. “I also have experience working with dirt and straightening things out. With my interest in aviation and abilities as a machine operator, I guess I put it all together and said ‘here I go!’ I made a commitment to the Lord. You don’t have the option of saying ‘no’ to the Lord.”
They travelled to Angola as MAF volunteers in late 2022. When they arrived in Cavango, they found an unfinished airstrip staked off with rebar, a 20-year-old Bobcat, and a 30-year-old D4 bulldozer. They had two weeks to complete the job.
“If I was bidding on that work,” says Giesbrecht, “I would have looked at the machinery and said it couldn’t be done in two weeks. But somehow Randy and I worked really, really hard, and we got it done, which is an amazing thing.”
The completed airstrip is owned and used exclusively by MAF pilots who service the nearby villages. People will often walk two or three days to receive primary healthcare in Cavango, where the clinic receives supplies and medicine flown in by MAF. Even more crucial are the emergency flights undertaken to bring patients to Lubango, Angola’s second-biggest city, for surgery or specialized treatment.
Approximately 45,000 people live within a few days’ walk from Cavango, and when motorcycle and vehicle transport is taken into consideration, MAF helps to serve the medical needs of about 100,000 Angolans.
“The airstrip is a lifeline for getting medevacs for patients requiring emergency surgeries, and also just transporting medicine and supplies,” says Reimer. “A matter of hours is critical in a lot of situations.”
Reimer and Giesbrecht weren’t able to witness the first takeoff or landing on their completed airstrip, but they got first-hand experience when they returned to Angola earlier this year. MAF needed the ground widened and some repairs performed. The two friends made the trip and landed on their airstrip outside Cavango.
“We were able to fly right onto the runway we had built,” says Giesbrecht. “That was a tearjerker for me – that feeling of the airplane touching wheels on a runway we’d built.”
Completed, widened, and with washout spots from heavy rains repaired, the airstrip continues to allow MAF pilots to serve southeast Angola with medical supplies, personnel transport, and emergency flights. Reimer points out that a more subtle advantage is the pressure it relieves from local doctors and nurses who’d have previously transported patients for up to 15 hours in a bouncing, jerking Land Rover.
“It took a lot of pressure off people working there so they can focus more on what they need to do,” he says. “MAF can come in now and transport these people for them. They can put them in the plane and in two hours they’re in Lubango, getting ready for surgery.”
Giesbrecht says that while things like public speaking have never come easy to him, he is able to use the skills he has to make a real difference in people’s lives.
“I can use my hands, or I can move dirt or something like that,” he says. “When the opportunity comes to do something that’s within your skillset, I think it’s very important that you respond.”
Adds Reimer: “Sometimes it felt like we were back in the sandbox with our Tonka trucks.”
The finished airstrip can be viewed on Google Earth, and MAF has uploaded a video of it to YouTube. A full timeline of the airstrip’s construction is available on MAF’s website. MAF also accepts donations online, and prospective volunteers can also find more information on the organization’s website.
