DESERTS, DAMS AND DIRT
Vietnam’s poor and faith in God drive this geotechnical engineer
Delwyn Fredlund grew up on a farm near Norquay, and has always loved the soil.
“Dirt became bread and butter for me,” says the Saskatoon man who made a career of studying soil as a geotechnical engineer.
He developed an expertise in the science of unsaturated soil mechanics that has taken him all over the world. Fredlund has written textbooks on the subject, and produced innumerable technical papers. He has received more awards than his office walls can hold, but his life’s work is about more that dirt.
Fredlund also has a passion for God. As a teen, he committed himself to sharing his faith wherever God led him. Back then, he thought that might mean he’d become a foreign missionary, but life led him into an engineering career where he excelled and became an internationally renowned leader in his field. In the process, he never hesitated to speak about his belief in God and his faith in Jesus Christ, but from time to time he experienced guilt that he hadn’t followed through with his promise to become a missionary. That is, until God brought the realization to his heart that in not hesitating to discuss his faith, he was indeed being a missionary. Fredlund’s passion for the world’s poor also began in his boyhood years, and was profoundly deepened when he visited Vietnam in 1993. There he witnessed the poorest of the poor, and fell in love with the people of Vietnam. Fredlund returned to Vietnam many times and was able to do international exchanges with a university there.
“I always went through Canadian federal government agencies like IDRC (International Development Research Centre) or CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency),” he says. “During the day, I worked with university professors and students teaching them soil science methodology. By night, I worked with the poor.
“The challenge for me was not mixing my work with religion. I spent my days doing engineering work, which is what I was paid to do, but evenings and weekends were my own.”
Fredlund found people he could trust through agencies like Samaritan’s Purse and Canadian Food for the Hungry and worked through them. He also set up a personal charity, Christian Fellowship Union (known in Vietnam as Caring For U.) Through his charity, he started schools for children in slums and a home for children with no parents, a school for blind children and a shop to train blind women in marketable skills like basketry. Through his efforts, an HIV support group was established, and a drug addiction centre which has an extremely high recovery rate.
All of this was just the beginning. Over the years, many people have expressed an interest in hearing Fredlund’s life story. Pam, one of his graduate students, said, “You’ve written so much technical stuff, now tell us your spiritual story.”
“I know the value and power of a story,” Fredlund says. “When my father passed away, one thing that saddened me deeply was realizing I would never hear his stories anymore. Some of my fondest memories are of sitting across the barn aisle from him as we milked our eight cows, listening to Dad tell stories.
“Everyone has a story,” he goes on, “even if they think they don’t. In Hanoi, I met a mom and her 13-year-old daughter who invited me to their home for supper. I went to their home with an interpreter and asked the mother to me tell her story. ‘I have no story,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing to tell.’ But I coaxed her to tell me about her life. She started to talk and soon the lady was crying, the interpreter was crying, and I was crying. Her story was so moving. When Pam urged me, I realized that I, too, have some interesting stories to tell. I hope someone somewhere will be positively influenced by them.”
Fredlund collaborated with a Calgary writer, Elsie Loewen, to produce Deserts, Dams and Dirt, which was released last year.
“The book shows some of the unique ways God has used me to change the lives of one person at a time,” he says. “Through a series of unique relationships that often started with one person, whole families have been changed.”
One of the stories concerns Miss Thui, a young girl who accosted him on a Hanoi street and begged him to talk English with her. After Fredlund returned home, he sent the girl US$20 for English lessons. Fredlund and his wife JoAnne continued the relationship by letter, and eventually made it possible for Miss Thui to attend university. Today she is a registered social worker and oversees many of the programs run by their charity.
Deserts, Dams and Dirt is available from delwyn.fredlund@gmail. com or Joanne.fredlund@gmail. com.