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Along about 78 years ago, a missionary visited a country church in Humboldt County. A 5-year-old boy listened to his story, spellbound, instead of staring out the window or folding the church bulletin into a paper airplane.

This is why you should always take a speaking engagement seriously – you never know what spark you might ignite.

The little boy grew up to be Dr. Robert Mandsager, who had decided that day in that church to become a medical missionary and eventually devoted 10 years to helping the people of Cameroon, Africa. But that’s not all. That speech he heard so long ago hasn’t finished echoing yet.

“Conrad and I have had the nagging feeling,” said Dr. Neil Mandsager, “that we wanted to go back and do something in Africa.” Conrad and Neil are two of Robert’s children, and they take nagging feelings just as seriously as their dad took that lecture.

They wanted to help. Northern Uganda needed all the help it could get. Years of war there had created the devil’s own list of job descriptions: Young boys carried weapons as members of the Lord’s Resistance Army, and young girls served as sex slaves.

Conrad Mandsager spent a year learning his way around the situation, founded ChildVoice International and in 2008 opened a rehabilitation center in a converted schoolhouse. The goal is to provide both education and medical care.

Conrad, 56, has been a Marshalltown resident, Wartburg College football player, Humboldt County farmer and East Coast dairy farmer and is now a consultant in New Hampshire. He had a wild side in the early going, but along the way, “he had a religious conversion, if you will,” said his brother Neil.

Conrad was in Des Moines recently on his way to the start of RAGBRAI and left behind some examples of the latest idea for funding the work of ChildVoice. The women of Lukodi, site of the ChildVoice project, are using paper from magazines to make necklaces. They roll up small triangles of paper to form beads, dip them in varnish and string them together. You can see examples for sale in the East Village at Aimee, 432 E. Locust St.

Before the necklaces arrived, Central Iowa already had helped the cause. Some individuals have contributed financially. RDG Planning & Design, Kevin Nordmeyer – formerly of RDG and now the director of the Iowa Energy Center at Iowa State University – and a design class at Iowa State have created a master plan for Lukodi.

Neil Mandsager, 53, gets involved in a hands-on way. A medical doctor specializing in perinatology, he has made three trips to the ChildVoice facility.

“In 2007. my parents and I took a medical team to the opening of the clinic,” he said. “In five days, we handled 500 patients.” Since then, the clinic has treated 27,000 more.

Here at home, Mandsager lives in Johnston and works in a medical office building south of Mercy Medical Center, where his office overlooks the steady flow of traffic heading into downtown Des Moines on Third Street. When he goes to Lukodi, it’s a long journey by air to Entebbe, Uganda, followed by an hour’s drive to Kampala, another drive of four to six hours to Gulu and 10 more miles to the ChildVoice site.

He plans to make his fourth trip in November with a small medical team. His church, the Lutheran Church of Hope in West Des Moines, will sponsor it.

The church is in a huge building not far from that monument to American comfort, Jordan Creek Town Center.

By way of contrast, it’s a sign of progress in Lukodi when ChildVoice can turn a woman away from making alcohol for sale and get her to produce beads instead.

It will be progress, that is, if the bead necklaces sell. In a nearly hopeless place like northern Uganda, they have plenty of customers for the alcohol.