Posted on 04/21/2002 4:31:00 AM PDT by Miss Marple
Nine thousand miles is a long ride just to pump a septic tank, but that wasn’t the original reason Loren Minnix went to Afghanistan.
The Greenwood man, a longtime local plumber, spent a week in March on a missions trip to the capital city of Kabul. He was among a team of 11 Americans, including six doctors, who assessed a neglected women’s hospital to determine what equipment and repairs were necessary to get it running properly.
The visit was an eye-opener even for Minnix, a Marine veteran who has made several overseas missions trips to Haiti, Japan, the Philippines and Sudan. In villages surrounding Kabul, families of shepherds and farmers live in stone huts built into hillsides.
“It’s like stepping back 2,000 years,” said Minnix, 58, the president and co-owner of Kellie Plumbing in Franklin.
In Kabul, thanks to the scorched-earth polices of the 1979 Soviet invasion and the intervening years of civil strife, landmarks such as the once-opulent national palace are now bombed-out shells where refugees struggle to survive. The Taliban stripped the national museum of its treasures, either to be destroyed or sold.
Minnix was gratified, however, to see Afghans rejoicing in their newfound freedom after years of oppression and conflict, which most recently involved being caught in the crosshairs of a global war against terrorism.
As one man told the group, “We’ve been prisoners for over 20 years in our own country.”
The effort was made under the auspices of the Avon-based Fellowship of Associates of Medical Evangelism. FAME’s executive director had mentioned the pending trip while visiting Minnix’s office to share mission stories and discuss a plumbing job.
Minnix volunteered for the voyage with his standard line: “Reckon do they need a plumber?”
Complex issues
The Richmond native’s taste for foreign field work dates to his teen years, when he quit school to join the military.
“I kind of went on my own personal study,” he said. “I joined the Marine Corps on my 17th birthday to see the world, and I haven’t quit yet.”
After four years of service in Japan and elsewhere, he married an Indianapolis girl named Becky and started a family, settling in Greenwood. Now together 35 years, the couple have four grown children and six grandchildren.
They operated L.E. Minnix Plumbing in Greenwood for 13 years before that venture was interrupted by one of Minnix’s trips. In 1993, he spent two weeks in Africa, working to help the so-called “lost boys of Sudan.” About 100,000 young men had been captured in a civil war, trained as soldiers, released when the training proved unsuccessful, then hunted down and killed to discourage an uprising. Bands of these young men subsisted on rodents, insects and vegetation while wandering the countryside, desperate to avoid execution.
“You’d find them mutilated on the road, crucified against trees,” Minnix recalled.
That mission involved securing construction equipment and laying out routes so that roads could be built to carry supply shipments, as an alternative to airlifts.
As in many strife-torn regions, however, the questions had no simple answers. Some European aid workers opposed the project, saying that the aggressors in the conflict would use the roads to advance their cause.
The critics had a point, Minnix admitted, but the American crew completed its mission. Minnix has learned to face such ambiguities in his overseas work.
“When it’s complex, I make myself a conduit of what is right, and then I leave the results up to God,” he said.
The Afghanistan trip was less controversial.
The 11-member FAME group flew to Peshawar, Pakistan, on March 16, then drove for 12 hours with an armed escort across the border to Kabul. Their work at the hospital from March 20 to 26 included assessing staff and equipment needs, establishing relationships with the local people for future efforts and cooperating with other aid groups to distribute medicine, food and other supplies.
The streets of Kabul were full of activity, Minnix said. March 22 was declared a day of national celebration, and many women, though their faces were obscured by the traditional burqas, were wearing high heels, apparently on their way to private parties.
They walked among convoys of diplomats, aid workers, government operators and shady characters from around the world. Some were there to help, Minnix said, but others were vying for a foothold in a strategic nation that lies along oil distribution routes.
“They’re all trying to establish their territory,” he aid. “Everybody has an ulterior motive.”
Knowing that sanitation and water problems are common in war zones, Minnix was not surprised to learn that his plumbing expertise was needed. Specifically, the hospital’s septic tank had not been serviced in more than 10 years. Various aid groups had studied the problem with no progress.
“The engineers said, ‘We’ve tried everything,’” Minnix said.
By lashing wooden ladders together, his group was able to gain access to the tank, buried deep underground. Removing the waste was another matter, however. Where would they find a pumper truck in Kabul?
Coincidentally, in the March issue of the Marine magazine Leatherneck, Minnix had been reading about the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which was guarding the nearby U.S. embassy. Thanks to the article, he was able to stroll up to the door, ask for the gunnery sergeant by name and strike up an acquaintance based on Marine camaraderie.
As it happens, the embassy had its own septic pumper truck, which Minnix borrowed in exchange for promising to send back computer equipment from the United States. The machine was more than adequate for the unusually difficult task, and the septic system was restored.
“That pumper was so strong it imploded the pipe,” he said.
That success, though far from glamorous, was typical of the good fortune the group encountered on the trip, a string of luck they attribute to a source that they simply trust without trying to understand too much.
“So many things went together on this, and what the result will be, none of us know,” Minnix said.
Since his return, Minnix has been in demand to share his tale with church and community groups. Even on local radio station WPZZ, where he offers his plumbing expertise on a weekly call-in show, the conversation turned to Afghanistan.
“I didn’t expect it to blow up like this,” he said.
For more information about FAME programs around the world, visit www.fameworld.org or call 272-5937.
When I saw the picture, I could only imagine all the Afghani womenfolk quoting Martin Luther King's "Free at last, Free at last,...Thank God Almighty I'm Free at Last!"......from their veil covered faces....much to the chagrin of Bella Abzug et al.
This man has been in business in our area for a long time. I never knew about his involvement with the "Lost Boys" and certainly never knew about his plans to go to Afghanistan. I am very proud of him.
Ed Anser and the "People for the American Way" must be right behind them picking up the slack
< /sarcasm >
I think I know which one will hear "Well done, thou good and faithful servant."
That's pretty easy to do.
99.99999999999 % of humans have more value than Alec Baldwin. I think I got enough 9's in there to leave him the last 10 people left.
I believe Mr. Minnix will hear those words
I have a friend who has been to the Sudan several times and the plight of those Christians in that country is terrible
Where's Jesse HiJackson? Oh, there's no money in it for him.
There's one around here that says,
We take sh!t from a lot of people,
but not from Osama bin Laden.
First thing that comes to mind is eight years of the Clinton Administration.
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