Justin Wren returns to combat sports for Bellator 141 on August 28th, leveraging his platform to spotlight Congo’s Pygmy communities—historically displaced by colonialists and exploited under King Leopold II’s rule, which killed 8-10 million. His organization, Fight for the Forgotten (Water4), secured 2,470 acres of land, drilled 25 wells, and trained locals in sustainability, contrasting with systemic corruption and deforestation wiping out Texas-sized forests. Wren’s upcoming book (September 15th) and fight against Josh Burns aim to fund humanitarian efforts, including combating malnutrition and modern slavery, proving how combat sports can drive lasting change beyond the cage. [Automatically generated summary]
So you talked about doing this when you were here before, and you said, you know, it was a good way to raise awareness for your cause, Fight for the Vergotten.
They use other kinds of stuff that's real sticky sap to kind of mend things together.
From trees, they also use vines to tie up a bunch of stuff.
Like soccer balls, they'll use a t-shirt, old t-shirt, a rag, and then they just use these vines and tie them so tightly that it becomes a perfectly round ball.
Well, that's one of the things about soccer that people find appealing is that it's not that hard to create a ball, and all you need is just flat ground.
Yeah, I think it might be like three quarters of the continental United States.
Something like that.
It's the 10th largest country in the world, I believe.
And so it's massive.
It's only got about 74 million people, but I think 85% of those people, or maybe 80-85% live on less than a dollar a day.
Yeah, it's the flip-flops between the poorest country in the world and second poorest, but it is the most underdeveloped country, so...
Least amount of roads, clean water, education, medical, like it's just the most underdeveloped.
Like when I go to Uganda, I kind of get the feeling of whenever I come back from Africa to the United States and how it's just like, wow, this is really developed compared to there.
When I go from Congo to Uganda, I feel like, wow, Uganda's really developed.
They got 3D movies, a yogurt land.
They have a KFC. Actually, they have like four or five KFCs now.
We just celebrated, as of yesterday, our 25th water well.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
And what's so great about that to me is I was there for the first 13 water wells.
And now we've built...
So what I love, and that website that was up, was we're partnered with Water4.
Now it's water4.org, so the number four.
But man, it's kind of like we set up an exit strategy.
This is a lifelong goal for me, and I'll be going back wholeheartedly, everything else.
But our goal is to empower the locals to be able to do it themselves.
I was there for the first 13 water wells.
People from the Director of Implementation of Water Fork come in and teach our guys hydrology, geology, all the different ins and outs of how to drill a well and protect it and all the sanitation.
But we're investing in the locals so that they can be the answer to their own problem, if that makes sense.
And then when they go out into a community, we invite the community into the project.
We want them to feel a part of it.
There's a lot of organizations out there, and I'm not trying to talk bad about them, but they'll go in with a million-dollar drilling rig and Westerners that are water engineers, and that's great.
But they'll go into a community and kind of say, you know, get back.
We're here to do this for you because you can't do it for yourself.
And then the parts are so expensive, they're not going to be able to repair it when it breaks.
And there's a good chance, like, I think, two and three of those expensive ones, or at least, no, one-third of them, don't operate after a year of drilling it.
And so what we want to do is go in there, teach the locals how to do it themselves, create a local economy for it and stimulate that, give people jobs, and then let the community feel a part of it.
So we look for day laborers in the communities we go to and give them a job while we're there.
Invite them in on the process, teach them some of it.
We've acquired some of those guys that are just big, strong, love helping people.
Now they're part of our team.
But the core of our team graduated from university in degrees of community development.
So that's what we want to do we want to go in there empower the locals and yeah, I'm a big part of it and but what I want to do is be able to fan the flames and say you can do it because a lot of international aid Tells the locals that they can't do it for themselves Maybe maybe they don't say that but it's kind of the way they go about attacking the problem and you got to go about it in a way that That kind of creates dignity for the locals instead of kind of robs them of dignity
I love that you're trying to help these people become a part of this solution, you know, instead of like someone solving it for them.
Now, when you're involved in digging these wells, and you're saying these expensive wells break, or the machines, like the pumps, how many parts are involved?
The way we go about it is, I would say, more simple but harder, a lot harder labor-intensive.
But it's just as safe.
Well, for instance, the deep wells, those are great.
And honestly, in a place like Ethiopia or places where the water tables are super deep, you're going to need those.
So those are absolutely part of the solution.
We need those water engineers.
We need those people doing that.
But whenever, say, in the Congo, it's a place that is Dangerous.
There's lots of rebel groups, lots of instability.
They're not going to drive a million dollar or half a million dollar drilling rig deep into the forest over these bridges that are notorious for collapsing and taking and washing away big lorries or 18-wheelers.
They're not going to drive them across there.
They can't get on the roads that we go on because they're heavy, they're dense, the parts break on the travel just out to the villages.
And then once you get there, like going into the Pygmy Villages where we are, sometimes it's taken up to two days, I think, to get our equipment into the village after we traveled there because we have to hike it all in.
And we can hike an hour off the nearest road to the village.
We can hike three hours from the nearest road to the village.
And so we're hiking in over a ton.
So when I'm saying this is hard, like our guys are, I think they're just as much fighters or more than I am because they're gritting down, they're hauling this stuff in from the augers.
The way we do it is we use a tripod and we use augers and ropes and pulleys and we use these chisels that go down and they're single prong, triple prong.
And so we have all these tools we can use for each obstacle that we're going to hit as we go down in different geological layers.
Like anywhere from gravel to bags of cement that are 100 pounds to the rock breaker that can be 40 pounds, another one that's 80 pounds, and another one that's like 130 pounds.
And then once we start drilling, our average well in other parts of the world where the obstacles aren't as big, they can bust out a well in a week, 10 days.
But where we are, we average 10 to 16 days per water well.
And so our guys are out there and living with the pygmies.
That's something that we selected every member of our team Based on, can they survive in the forest?
And more than that, can they love my pygmy family?
Because that's important because other people around there, a lot of them don't love them, hate them, or discriminate.
So we want to find people that are passionate about the people, passionate about the water crisis.
And then that way, yeah, we can then teach them and put the tools in their hands and invest in them.
And so that's what the last four years has been for me, really investing in good people, people that believe in it.
And then from there, we can fan the flames for them.
Is it perplexing for you to have discovered this place and, you know, to being alive in the 21st century with all the modern communication and all that and to know that these people are out there and no one has tried to do this before and that you're stumbling across these giant groups of people that don't have anyone looking out for them?
I mean, I would say that I'm not the only guy that's ever tried to help them, but I would say that maybe we're trying to take an approach, and that's what's so awesome about the university that I'm partnered with.
They've been working with the Pygmies for years and years.
The guy that's leading the way, the Dean of the School of Community Development, he's been doing it since the year I was born.
And then he started with the university there for the last 10 years.
So I went to them to say like, hey, how can we do this in a strategic way that the impact will last?
It'll keep going on and on and on instead of a lot of...
I don't know if it's American culture or what, but it's so fast, you know, and we want the quick fix.
And the quick fix a lot of times isn't the best route.
The results can just be a temporary one where we have a...
I call it the show up, blow up, and blow out technique.
We show up, we do the show, we take the pictures, and then we leave and we never come back.
And so what we want to do is be opposite.
We want to build relationships, get in touch.
We want to be like a family with them and then show them that, hey, we're not just here for land because that's what we started with first.
We petitioned, lobbied, and basically said, yeah, we went to battle saying, I mean in a peaceful way, but said, these people are the first people of Congo.
Not just that.
A lot of people say they're the first people of Africa.
Well, if that's true, then that's the origins of humanity.
I was just reading this Bill Nye thing about humans.
It was just some quote that he had said about the human race.
It's been proven now that we are literally all one race and the only thing that's different is our exposure to ultraviolet light and different environments have changed the way we look and how our bodies react to the environment.
Well, we know that all people, as far as we know today, you know, the knowledge kind of grows and changes over the years, but we know today that all human beings, as far as we know, came from Africa.
So if that's the case, these people you're dealing with could very well be the oldest humans in the world.
And it kind of makes sense if you really think about it.
I mean, that's where the primates evolved and came down from the trees and started experimenting and moving along and trying different environments and spreading out throughout the land.
All I know is, man, the culture there, their hearts, they're such sweet people.
And I don't use that word a whole lot, but they're just...
They're sweet as can be.
And so whenever we went in with my team, basically it was like local-led.
I mean, I was in the picture, but kind of playing behind the scenes when it came to the negotiating.
And they went in there, and it was the dean of the School of Community Development.
It was my guy that's the director of Fight for the Forgotten in Congo.
And they said, these are the first people of Congo.
Why is it that they have zero land of their own?
Because shouldn't they have some land to call their own?
And we know that looking through history and whether it was you or whether it was your grandfather, we stole this land from them.
We stole it.
They have none of their own.
And don't they have a right to have some land?
And so that's kind of where, yeah, we just lobbied on their behalf and then said, so if I bought the land in Fight for the Forgotten, if we would have bought it in our name, we would have gotten a five-year certificate and we would have had to renew things and fees and everything every five years.
If we bought it in the name of the university there that we partner with, It would have been a 25-year certificate, but then at the end of the 25 years, we'd have to pay the same price that we purchased it for 25 years earlier.
Would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars every 25 years, maybe more.
And then we were thinking, it's kind of cool.
In Africa, I would say a lot of the countries, at least, my understanding is that it was the colonialists or colonists or however you say that, they were the ones that set up the boundaries of the countries.
It wasn't the tribes.
And so, like say Rwanda, the Hutu and Tutsi, they probably wouldn't have put their country together right there because they've had a long history of disputes with each other.
So they wouldn't be in the same country.
They would have been two different countries.
Same thing in Congo, there's over 200 tribes.
So, in Congo, what's very, I don't know, here we're all, America, America Pride, or Texas, and things like that, but in Congo, it's about what tribe you're from.
And so, in a lot of parts of Africa, they're really proud about their tribe.
And so, on the government level, the strongest thing in court was buying the land in the name of a tribe, because that's what they respect, that's what they value, and yet nobody was petitioned.
Petitioning and lobbying on behalf of the Pygmies.
So that's what we wanted to do.
We wanted to go in and say these people deserve some land.
What we did was buy it from the people that originally stole it from them, whether it was them or their grandfather.
And so that benefited the people that were basically oppressing them financially.
And we gave them years and years worth of salary.
To work with us.
And then on both sides, we said, so they benefited financially and the pygmies benefited by having their own land.
You can't give them a water well without them owning the land that they're on.
And so then we said, how can we give you both water?
That's what the next step is.
And the next step after that is food.
How can we start a farming project?
Teach the pygmies how to farm correctly or farm really for the first time.
A lot of them worked for their former masters and stuff like that.
But then with the makpala, which means non-pygmies, we're like, how can we teach you better farming practices?
You need to plant your seeds deeper.
You need to put your seeds farther apart because they're not producing fruit because the corn is only half of a cob instead of a full cob because your plants are basically choking themselves out.
So we have three agriculturalists.
We're interning right now.
They've already done a great job, but we're wanting to expand from three villages to ten villages.
It's just an immense sacrifice that you've done, that you've taken on, and it's probably quite difficult to find people that have the same kind of passion for it that you have.
Maybe I shouldn't quote myself on this, but I think it's around 150, 150, 200. So you guys have to carry that for hours.
You could.
Some of the land is only like a 30-minute hike off the nearest quote-unquote road.
That's just dirt and clay and silt and big boulders.
But yeah, most of them are 30 minutes an hour, two hours, one's even three hours off the nearest road.
So yeah, we got to hike that stuff all in.
But I would say that the manual drilling method, which has been approved by UNICEF and USAID and all these other major organizations that say it can be just as clean, just as safe as the deep water wells as long as we do it to a high standard and keep a high integrity when we do it.
Which means we backfill it with a clay sanitary seal.
We put a cement plug on there so that way there's no sort of bacteria or anything else that can get down into our well.
We gotta protect the water table.
And so we do that every single time to a high standard.
But yeah, so whenever we're doing it, the machine is us.
The manual drilling method, we have wrenches and those augers.
And so those augers would look kind of like a folder.
I think the deepest we've gone is like 70. So when you're doing 70 feet, what kind of a pipe do you have to keep attaching a longer and longer pipe to it?
I just don't know how it could possibly really work.
I have a friend who had a well dug out here, and they hired this guy to come over, and they had the two sticks, and he's standing there, and he's telling them where to dig.
And the gravel pack kind of keeps any dirt, silt, sand, depending on what layer we're in, it keeps that from coming into our well.
So that way the water that is inside of our casing, there we go, our four-inch casing pipe, that allows, it has like little slits in it.
Maybe it would be like the size of a A saw if you just kind of put a saw in there and it's every like centimeter apart from each other and that way inside of our casing and Before the water touches our pipe like it's crystal clear.
It's clean We test it all that stuff and so the gravel pack keeps the sand the the dirt the silt anything out of our well Wow That's incredible, man.
It's just incredible, the amount of thinking and planning and all that's involved in just getting people what everybody here just totally takes for granted, water.
It's taken us a month in one spot, a month, because we had a failed well.
And, man, it's brutal.
And sometimes, man, I'm thankful that I was a fighter, because sometimes you have to Bite down on your mouthpiece and just keep swinging whenever you want to give up and you have a team out there that's tired.
So in between the failed well and the other one, we took two days off, but we can't go back to, we call it Bunia, the town where we can kind of...
Rest and get some good food and come back out.
What we did was go to a little market and get more dried fish and some more rice and some more beans.
And we're like, hey, we're out here.
We're not stopping until we finish, until we get these people clean water.
And when you look at what they're drinking, we do the water walks with them.
I love telling my team, like, let's do the walk that they have to go on to get water.
And, man, I've gone 45 minutes, an hour.
Walking with the women because it's the women that collect the water in that culture because the men are off in the fields or they're off hunting or they're off doing stuff.
So the women go and get the water and it can be a 45 minute hour hike with these 20 liter jerry cans and 20 liters I think full is like 40 or 44 pounds whenever it's full and they're going to get dirty water.
Dirty water.
That is a 45 minute hike away from them.
And they're bringing back one or two of those 44 pound jerry cans.
So some of these Mabuti pygmy women are literally carrying their body weight or more in water.
There's a pygmy woman named Mama Miriamo, and I love her to death, and she's so great.
But she's lost five of her seven children.
Due to this illness and her husband.
There's a video on it too.
I think it's called the Opportunity at Freedom or something that's on the Waterfore site.
But five of seven children are gone and her husband and it's all waterborne disease and she has river blindness.
So not only has she lost all her, not all of her children, but five and her husband, but she's blind and she's blind because of river blindness.
And so the worms get in your body and there's five different kinds.
Of filarial worms and one kind of the worms, like the babies, go to your retina, I think, and they attack and eat and live and sleep in the retina of your eyes until you have no vision left.
Fuck.
And four of the five don't do that.
But what it does is it irritates your skin.
Supposedly, I've had it.
I've had to take the treatment.
Whenever I took the pill, it made my body itch, and that's how you know if you had it or not, is if your skin itches.
Right, it's killing the worms, killing the parasites.
And so I was like, man, if I have this, and if our team has it, because we treated our well drillers first, and some of them broke out in rashes and hives and really were itching.
And it's just a part of it.
If you go to that region, you're going to get it, if you're out there long enough.
Maybe not if you go for a week, but if you go for an extended period of time, you need to at least take the treatment to make sure you don't have that.
And so I was like, man, if I supposedly had it and if my team has it, then I know the pygmies, it's like ravaging them, you know?
And so we went to the different villages and took a scale and from that we knew how much medicine we should give them.
Yeah, so it was a big eye-opening experience for her, but the vegetation, it's nuts.
So the Amazon is the biggest rainforest in the world, but the Congo is the second largest, but it is the densest, the thickest.
It's the hardest to navigate through.
There's parts in Uganda that barely touch the stuff in Congo, but they call it the impenetrable forest because there's sayings that it's harder for a fish to swim through the rivers there because even the rivers are thick vegetation and all this stuff.
Um, in some parts, but dude, it's, it's crazy.
Like walking through and hiking through, I have a picture that's going to be in my book of, of Ben walking.
And I was like, how much of this do we have to walk through?
It was, we were literally macheting, uh, using a machete to get through, um, to this pygmy village.
And I'm like, dang, they walk through this every day where it's like the, you're just walking through the thicket that's going across your face, going across your arms.
There's bugs latching onto you while you're doing that.
There's mosquitoes like crazy at all times.
There's the ants.
The ants will literally look like a small creek or rushing river.
I've seen them at least, literally at least two foot wide, and you can hear them.
You can hear them.
It's two foot wide of ants.
And it's just a black river because it's these ants that are just rushing, running in and out of things.
And, yeah, so there's bumblebees there that are, like, bright, or they have a bright blue or purple on their back.
I'm kind of partially colorblind, but I can see them.
Actually, reach in there and you'll see the actual cloth that's his.
So this is kind of a thank you way that they kind of gave me a few things to remember them by and to say, like, tell your friends and people that supported this, like, thank you.
He's probably 12. None of them really know their age just because they don't really have a calendar and don't keep up with it and don't have school or anything like that.
Stripped it out of the rubber and made himself a stringed instrument.
But if you sand geese over my back and this is just us, this is...
How we learn the most about how we can help them.
When we sit around the campfire with them, we've kind of made a goofy name for it, but we call it Campfire University because that's where they take us to school.
Whenever we're sitting around, that's where we can hear the truth about how they're really treated.
No one else is around, like any of their oppressors and stuff.
They're able to just be themselves.
Sometimes we would pretend to be asleep.
Um, so other people would leave, but now this is on their own land and they have like freedom to, to just chill and relax.
Um, and then if you go to the next picture, but, uh, I just, okay.
So you got that picture also, but that's, uh, one of the first antelope wild kind of bush meat that I got to eat.
And then the men and the women sometimes, too, they go through with leafs and other things and make sounds, and they scare the antelope into their nets.
I've seen how they string this out.
These nets can be, man, they can be a football field in length, and then they scare the antelope into it, and then they have to catch up to it before it escapes, and they spear it.
So I was there for his first kill and his second kill.
And they were months apart, though.
This is, I think they call it a large spotted genet.
Or I think I'm pronouncing that right.
It's G-E-N-E-T. And it looks like a cross between, I don't know, a mongoose and a baby leopard or something like that.
But I've been, someone tried to sell me okapi meat.
Have you ever seen that animal?
It's got the butt of a zebra.
It's got the body of an antelope and the head of a giraffe.
I know it sounds crazy.
It's only in the Congo, and that's what it looks like at least, but it's in the Giraffidae family, and so it's the only other surviving animal in that family.
And so kind of like with their situation of them being the first citizens of Congo, that's what we always use with them, the terminology, similar to the Native Americans and what we did here.
Pushed them off their land, took their land from them.
That's what happened to the pygmies.
And so that's kind of, it's similar to...
To something that I was thinking is, hey, we could get these people these little kind of reservations.
We have 10 different plots of land.
All of them are 247 acres, or eight of them are.
One's like half a square kilometer, so like 120, and the other is like close to 500 acres.
And so, but that's their land.
They'll pass down.
And what we want to do is, on one of them, we started replanting trees that are targeted for deforestation.
So one of our agriculturalists that we're interning, we gave him a goal.
His name's Dramani.
Great dude.
We want him to replant a thousand trees.
We're like, hey, you can feed anyone that helps you.
The pygmies, give them breakfast, lunch, dinner, and we'll give them a day's wage and teach them how to make money and how to work for the first time making money.
When he came back, we were blown away because he had replanted 3,500 trees.
Just the perspective that you must gain from being in this insane environment, it's got to be a really, for lack of a better word, enriching experience.
I don't need to live for myself Like this problem like what if I could be part of a little a little part a little link in the chain To help to be in the in the problem in whatever small problems anybody here has in comparison to the issues that they have there It's it's one of the things that happens to people when crisis It takes place when there's any sort of a crisis like after 9-11 One of the weirdest aspects of being in New York was how friendly everybody was
like everybody kind of had this newfound perspective They had this new instead of dealing with the stress and the the grind of the big city in the traffic and all the nonsense and all the Agro behavior that people normally had it wasn't there.
It was like people were friendly and they were nice and kind it's like they had put it in perspective and Because of the attack.
Anything that they get for that day, even whenever they're working underneath their slave masters and they're getting a minnow for a full day's labor or two bananas for a family of four or five that are literally working from sunup to sundown, they get two bananas to share.
Like, whenever we talk to them about it, yes, they'll say, we need more.
This is slavery.
This is slave labor.
Like, it's terrible.
It's, you know.
But whenever they get that food at the end of the day, like, they're thankful for it.
Like, because they gotta have it.
But the oppressors use that as a way to keep them hungry so that they have to come back the next day and work.
It might be crushed or broken, and they might have that for the whole village.
Wow.
But some places, no.
Some places, not at all.
Some places, I give them my iPhone, and they get to look at themselves, and they're just like, oh my goodness, because they've only seen themselves really in reflection of water and stuff like that.
But, man, on my Instagram at the Big Pygmy, there's some pictures of me actually giving this village Pictures.
And dude, some of their expressions whenever they get to see a picture of themselves for the first time, it's like the craziest looks in their eyes seeing themselves on a piece of paper.
So in Congo, the Belgian Congo with like King Leopold II, who was due to as evil as Hitler...
I mean, they say during his reign of Congo, he said in Europe that he was like the savior of Congo, that he was helping all the Congolese, but really he was extorting them for mainly rubber and ivory.
And there was an estimated 20 million people, and there's a book called King Leopold's Ghost, and the guy had a big old beard, kind of like I have in one of those pictures with Sanghee.
But what they say is that it's an estimated 10 million people, half the population of Congo, that he was responsible for killing and murdering.
So they call that like the African Holocaust or one of the first Holocaust because there was, you know, six, some, I mean, I'm not sure about the Jewish Holocaust, six million or something like that.
But this was eight to 10 million people.
Half the, half of the Congo was, was murdered and everything else just over rubber, the rubber boom and, and ivory.
And I had, I had a slingshot for you from like the original rubber, but it kind of like rotted and broke.
Yeah, and whenever the outsiders make it so much even harder for you to hunt because they're cutting down the trees and it's making the animals skittish and scared and so much harder for you to find them.
And they'll bring in trucks from Kenya and Tanzania and Rwanda.
And there's some, like, big businessmen that then sell these hardwoods to China, the U.S., Brazil.
I mean, just different big countries that they send it out.
And I've seen these hardwood on these roads sometimes...
Three-fourths of an 18-wheeler or a lorry is what we call them there.
It can be completely sunk in mud or it can just be fallen off of a face of a cliff because it's so overloaded.
They fill up these containers just so full with this heavy, heavy, heavy wood because if they can get it back, then they're going to make a ton of money off of it.
So they just overload it because it's so hard to get from point A to B to like Mombasa and Kenyatta where they can ship out this stuff.
I think they said, I forget where I got it, it was a reputable source, but the size of Texas has been cut down from the Congo rainforest in the last, like, just 20 or 25 years.
Last 20-25 years of the rainforest in Congo, the size of Texas, which that's where I'm from.
I mean, it's huge.
It's 13 hours from east to west, maybe more in Texas, on good roads.
And then to think about the fact that it takes hundreds of years to replenish those forests if they do get replenished, because the environment that they're growing in, it gets changed as soon as you chop everything down, then the sun bakes the land, and then there's less rain.
That's got to be such a strange place to go while you're there and you're trying to help and you're trying to replenish and help these communities and give them water and help them sustain.
And then you're hearing these trees fall and knowing that there's just these insensitive people just chopping down trees left and right and fucking the whole thing up.
And literally the first trip she came on, which was only like...
Six months before that, like all those trees were there.
All those trees were there and it was and now we walk into it and it's probably like 10 or 20 acres of trees that were just leveled in that amount of time and the way that they were doing it there wasn't by these guys weren't using the big chainsaws and everything else.
They were just like going at it with axes and stuff.
And a lot of it actually isn't just for the hardwoods.
I mean, I would say that's the majority of the problem, but another big problem in Congo or Sub-Saharan Africa is the charcoal everyone uses for cooking.
They get it from these trees.
They cut them down, they chop them up into little bits, and then they throw big mounds of dirt over them, and they set them on fire and they smolder it for two, three weeks, I think.
And then it comes out in these kind of hard, compressed little charcoal pieces.
And so then that's what they cook with everywhere.
But I had been back for like two months or something, or maybe even close to three.
And yeah, they were going all crazy and stuff.
And this is just a stat that I like to...
It's something that grips my heart, so that's why I want to say it now.
But...
Man, I think I looked it up right before I got in here, and it was around 11,000 people that Ebola took out.
11,000 people, that's a ton.
It's a ton.
It's a brutal crisis.
But I just remember the uproar and the fear.
Like, the outcry that happened publicly all over the United States, and only a couple people got it here.
And then, still, that's terrible.
But whenever I compare that, 11,000 people total in this Ebola crisis, and then the stat for children, and this is on Water4's website and stuff, and on ours, and, dude, it's what I want to fight and let people know, because there should be a real public outcry and uproar that 5,000 kids 5,000 kids under the age of 5 years old die every single day.
Every single day because of dirty water.
Because of waterborne disease.
Because of waterborne illness.
That's a legit stat from like UNICEF or one of those like legit places.
5,000 every day.
It fluctuates from like 4,700 or something to 5,000 a day.
And like for me, man, I've held two of those children, you know?
I've dug the grave.
I've had blisters on my hands.
I've had a little dude named Andy Bowes blood on my hands.
And like, bro, it wrecks me.
And like, that's why I'm so passionate about this thing.
And like, I come back and I get it.
Ebola's terrible.
And we need to knock it out because it can take out so many people.
But why?
Why are people not...
Why don't they have their eyes open, their ears open, their heart open to hearing about 5,000 kids dying every day?
I've been to the funeral of five other kids.
I've seen the grave of nine or ten others besides that.
And these are just among the pygmies.
I've seen the funerals going on of their oppressors, like the slave masters and the makpala, the non-pygmies that surround them.
Their kids are dying in the dirty water.
And it's not...
I don't I don't mean to go crazy, but no, it's not crazy at all It's and that statistic is crazy 5,000 a day a day and they're under five years old So I mean, I don't know how many with the six seven eight nine-year-olds, you know I've been to the funerals of those kids.
We are very strange about what we have What we focus our attention on and the Ebola thing is just something that was over here because we were worried about it coming over here We don't see a problem over here.
We It's so convenient for people to not look at impoverished third-world countries, people that are just, they've always been in this sort of state of poverty, so we just sort of accept them at being like that.
We don't think that they necessarily, that they have to live the way we live or have access to clean water and medical.
We just don't even think about it.
We worry about Cecil the Lion.
The fucking outrage about Cecil the Lion, where everybody's going nuts and freaking out.
Yeah, I mean, look, poaching's terrible.
It's awful.
Animals are beautiful.
I get it.
But the way we reacted to that, to know your statistic, to know that what you just said, that 5,000 little kids die every day from dirty water, and people aren't freaking out about that.
And the thing that really wrecked me with that was, so I spoke at this university in Oklahoma, it's slipping my name, or the name's slipping me, but their students, this is right when I got back from Congo, and they had heard about what I was doing.
It was Southern, it's in Oklahoma City, SNU, and they said, come speak to our students, we want to try to raise enough for a water well.
And dude, they set out in their courtyard.
They set out in their courtyard 5,000 white flags.
And this is a massive courtyard.
They set out 5,000 little white flags and on it said the stat that's 5,000 kids every day die of dirty water.
And so I saw that right before I went up and spoke and I went and saw the courtyard and it just wrecked me because like for me, like the people that see that, like the stat can go in one ear.
It can it can jack with you for a little bit.
It can mess with your mind.
It can mess with your heart.
Um, but it's so easy to go in one ear and out the other, or once you sleep, you know, you're not going to wake up thinking about that just from seeing those white flags.
And so I grabbed one of those white flags and I, and hopefully some of the people just from seeing those flags will get it.
But like, I had to write Andy Bo on the back.
And, and then when I got up and spoke, I showed him, I'm like, Hey, every one of these white flags, you see it, you saw it, like it's a terrible statistic, but this, the real statistic is that each and every one of those flags has a name.
Like, it's a person.
It's a human being.
It's a little kid.
And, like, he didn't have to die of dirty water.
Not in today's age.
Not in today's age when we have the answer to the problem.
When we know what we can do about it and just people decide not to or, like you said, make the uproar about Cecil the Lion.
I mean, every American probably knows the name Cecil the Lion.
Or at least 90% probably do.
And, like, I bet not even 10%, not even 5% know that 5,000 kids every day are dying just because of 31. I don't even think it's 1%.
So that was when I gave the chief, Andy Bo's chief, my first promise I ever made the Pygmies, which was...
We had buried him and he had told us that he was rejected hospital treatment twice.
So he didn't just die of waterborne disease, but his other brother, his father had died of waterborne disease and his mom was all alone now.
And she couldn't even cry, bro, whenever I met her or whenever I saw her at this time.
Like, she was topless and I could see every single bone in her sternum, like every single rib attached to her sternum because she was so hungry and she was so malnourished and she was so thirsty.
And so our team went and we got mangoes and passion fruit juice, rice, and tilapia.
And we brought it back and fed it to her.
And it wasn't maybe 10 minutes.
And I was wondering, is she in shock?
Why is she not crying?
Like, why am I messed up from this so much more than the mother?
And it was because she was so malnourished.
She just didn't have the energy to produce a tear over her son's death.
So she got the mango.
She drank the passion fruit juice.
It wasn't 10, 15 minutes later that then she started sobbing.
Because she had, like, that sugar and that energy a little bit.
And then after that, like, dude, the next day was so brutal.
And I had blisters on my hand from digging the grave.
And that's when the chief came up and said, the first time we went and got treatment, they told the mother, you're too dirty to come in here.
And she said, well, can you give them treatment?
I know it's just a pill or a shot.
And they said, do you have money?
She said, I'm a slave.
I don't get paid in money.
And they said, well, then go away.
And then the second day, the whole village, and this is like 85 or 100 people, they grab everything they can, which was like almost two dozen eggs.
They brought a chicken and They brought a bag of charcoal.
They brought firewood.
And then they were able to beg because they don't make money.
These ones hadn't at this time.
And they were able to beg enough for three and a half dollars worth of Congolese franc.
And $3 was the treatment.
$3 was, I think it was a dollar for the pills that would have helped Andy Bo.
They were probably too late for the pills to work, but maybe $3 for the shot, the injection that would have helped him quicker.
And it was something like $45.
It's in the book, I got the real number.
$45 for his casket that I buried him in.
And it just blew my mind that the oppressors, the people, the makpala, the non-pygmies that surround the pygmies were thinking like, These people are so worthless or they're like animals or whatever that it's easier for us to let them die or cheaper for us to let them die than to take care of them.
And so that's when the chief grabbed me and pulled me to the side and said, Efe, which Efeosa is my first pygmy name.
It means the man who loves us.
And he pulled me aside and said, Efe, we don't have a voice.
Nobody knows about our suffering.
Can you help tell people?
Can you be a voice for us?
And that was when I said yes.
Because I couldn't promise them clean water.
I couldn't promise them land.
I didn't know how all of that stuff was going to go.
But I knew that through MMA and through some of the other stuff, like a platform, that, hey, I can at least help these people have a voice of some sort, even if it's just with 100 people.
What you're talking about is just, it's not even human.
I mean, it's so outside of the realm of our imagination, to even imagine...
Living in a world where someone won't give someone a $3 shot or whatever it costs to treat a baby that's dying and this woman can't even cry because she doesn't have any food.
She doesn't have enough energy for tears.
I can't, I can't imagine that world.
And you continue to go back there to try to help these people.
now you are gonna fight like not just not just like try to build them wells not just try to help them and get them food but now you're you're gonna fight in Bellator and try to raise more awareness for this what what is it man you make this decision You decide to come back to America.
You're training in Dallas, right?
You're training a team takedown where Johnny Hendricks, former welterweight champion trains big giant modern facility one of the best places in the world and you are preparing for this fight But your main goal, you love the sport, but your main goal is to try to bring awareness to the Pygmies.
So it's kind of a crazy way of a roundabout sort of a way of getting attention to them to compete in a sport and arguably the most brutal sport in the world.
Yeah, I think for me, I always thought I could only do, or for the last four years, I thought I could only do one or the other.
First and foremost, My family, the people there, I'm not ever going to give that up.
So it's worth it to me.
If I never had to fight again, fine.
So be it.
That's okay with me.
So I was just so focused on that and building the team and getting something legitimately started that will really Impact them long term, not just a flash in the pan.
But I saw fighting as something that is a platform.
I mean, I'm here with you now just because I was a fighter and then the other stuff that came about, but that's the link together.
And my wife started talking to me and other people started talking to me and kind of said, well, what if you could do both?
And yeah, fighting the lifespan of it, that's kind of like a flash in the pan.
It's just, it's a short, limited window.
And the thing, the problem there is going to take a lifetime worth of dedication.
And so what if...
What if for a season in my life, it could just be a year or two.
I'm planning on it being five to seven years.
That way I can really make a run if I can.
That's what I want to do.
And what if that can set it up in a way that the long-term solution and impact is bigger, better, greater, more sustainable.
People know about it more.
And people want to get involved.
I think that...
It's hard kind of living in the two different worlds, going back and forth because they're so different.
I kind of feel like I go there and I see what's wrong and I'm like, oh, it shouldn't be like this.
But then I come back here and I'm like, ah, what's wrong here?
And it shouldn't be like this.
And so I feel like I kind of don't necessarily belong in either one.
And if I do, I belong more in the forest with them.
Wow.
Our hearts are so connected, and so it's like culture shock here, and I don't get culture shock there at all.
And I went to Popeye's right when I got back, and it was after I had...
Buried Andy Bo and it was my second trip back coming back that was in like 2011 I think or maybe 2012 and I get back and I'm in a I go straight to Popeyes and it's in Atlanta and I Walk inside, and there's this mom and daughter, and they're there with a group that's going to do some kind of international aid in Haiti.
They got their Haiti shirts on, and it wasn't too long after the earthquake and stuff, maybe a year and a half, two years after Haiti.
And the daughter is sitting there and she's saying, uh, I'm gonna get a Coke and I'm waiting behind them at the Coke machine.
And so she starts filling up with the Coke.
Her mom goes, pour that out.
You're not going to have that.
And she goes, mom, they don't have Coke in Haiti, which Coke's in Congo, Coke's everywhere.
Coke's like, that was the first thing I wanted to say.
Um, but, but right after that, like the mom's like, if you drink that, you're grounded.
She goes, mom, you're going to ground me over a Coke.
And then they just went back and forth bickering.
And then all of a sudden turned into, you are grounded.
Two weeks when we get back.
Then all of a sudden the girl got pissed.
Looked at her mom and said, Mom, I hate you.
I hate you.
And she stormed out.
And this is at the airport.
They got their shirts on.
They haven't even gone on their trip yet.
And I'm just thinking like I wanted to grab them, not in a mean way, but grab them and just say, look, love each other.
Like you're fighting over a Coke.
You're fighting over sugar water.
Like stop.
Like stop it.
Like love each other.
Like you're about to get a rude awakening when you go to Haiti and I've been there and I've seen the people walking through snow drifts of garbage to take a bath and walking back out and having to climb up that snow drift of garbage to get out after they took their bath.
And I've seen them digging in the trash to find food.
I've seen kids sniffing glue to fall asleep.
Like, I'm like, you guys are about to get wrecked.
And like, it wrecked me too, because I'm like, I just buried a kid over dirty water.
And now you guys are fighting over sugar water.
This is one thing.
I don't want to offend people in a way of saying our culture is terrible or bad, but I want to point out certain things that life's bigger than our small problems.
If we can get our eyes off of those small problems and get our eyes onto the big picture, it'll do a lot of good.
It'll change a lot of things in our own lives, our own hearts, our own relationships.
One thing, Water4 has been an organization that is, like...
Believed in us since the very beginning kind of like you Whenever I had come back and I'd seen you know the two things but practically I hadn't done anything yet I hadn't like gotten land to start a water I didn't know I just had the passion and the dream and you put me on here and let me tell people that water for kind of did the same thing and They they gave me the tools when I had none the the training and knowledge when I didn't know anything and And just got behind me but I got back and three days later I was at their gala and
it was awesome.
It was a great event and man I was crying because they did a video of me in the Congo and then I had to get up and speak.
And it was real tough, but I go right from there, and three days later, I'm at kind of like a black tie event, and women are wearing fur and all this stuff.
And so it just was like, whoa, from one world to the other.
But I see it as a way to, like there, they did so much that night for this project, for the people, for my family.
The Water 4 thing, a little update for you, Fight for the Forgotten has gone into a dormant stage in our nonprofit.
And we have officially partnered with Water4.
We joined forces with them because when it comes to the reporting, the business...
Anyways, even the logistics and the training, their water engineers, their hydrologists, the different kinds of things that they can add to us are so great.
They've given us a truck, all the tools, all the training.
They've really been a huge component behind us.
But one of the things I love most about them is...
Yeah, we're partnering in a way that...
How would I explain it?
We see the eye-to-eye on something.
Like, the founder, he says, Water 4 isn't about charity.
It's about opportunity.
Dude, I love that because when you just do charity, you just help for such a short amount of time.
But the Water 4 method is like, hey, we're going to put the tools in their hands, the knowledge in their heads, and then we're going to look to create an opportunity for them that goes beyond what we can do from the West or from our short-term mission humanitarian trip.
We want to give this thing a life of its own, that it becomes a breathing, living thing, or even a business.
They're in 31 different countries, and they're helping these entrepreneurs do social good.
They get paid to drill water wells and to train nationals, and the jobs don't have to go outside.
They can stay inside the house.
I've loved that about them.
The cool thing that I love is that it's not about us being the heroes.
It's about the locals being the heroes.
That's the thing.
I don't want to be the hero of this.
I want to be a spark plug, if that makes sense, in the engine.
I want to get it started, get it running.
But the people are the strength, the engine, the thing that makes it run.
The spark plug gets it started, but but the locals and investing in them telling them you can do it fly on your own wings like You just need the training.
You just need the knowledge.
You just need the tools once you have that you're golden You know once they have fresh water though, there's still gonna be the issue of food though, right?
I mean it seems like with the logging you're saying it's more difficult to hunt Yeah, so what we've been doing is we're interning the three agriculturalists right now and we're about to hire them.
It's awesome.
I'm so pumped But the guy that did the 3,500 trees, he's great at farming.
And so in three of the villages, we wanted to kind of start on a smaller scale first because it is land, water, and food.
And there's kind of a process to it.
You know, you can't start growing food or having water without the land.
First, you need, I mean, you can't live without water for more than three days, I think, right?
Or at least some of it.
And then food, you can live for like three weeks without.
And so, or something like that.
And so, with the food, we start in three different areas, three different villages.
One's Tundu, and they're the ones.
Sange's grandfather, Leo May, he's one of the most brilliant men I've ever met.
Maybe he's never gone to school.
But I promise, the dude is just a problem solver.
And he inspires his people, the whole village, to get around the vision and let's do this.
And so we basically said, start with what you have.
That's kind of the Water 4 method too.
Start with what you have and we're going to come and we're going to fuel it.
We want to empower you to be able to do it for yourself.
And and that's what people need they need a little little jump start and so So anyways in this village and just Liam is I wish I would have brought in the list of what it is but From the time I came back and got married and went back about 10 weeks ago.
I Got to celebrate the 20th water well that was dug and drilled and it was such an awesome celebration of But one of the most exciting things to me was that I walk into Tundu and at first I was like, no way.
How is this happening?
All of a sudden I was walking through a forest of bananas.
And they had planted on their own.
We had helped too.
We help when we can and we want to help so much more.
But they had planted over 250 banana trees out there.
Over 250 surrounding their village.
They had done corn, whole field, huge field of corn, cassava, which is kind of like a spinach type, tastes kind of like spinach.
They make sambay out of it.
They had done potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts, Maracuja or passion fruit and yams.
That's eight.
I think the list might have nine or ten.
But they had done that all from, hey, if we get you your own land, do you think we could help you with water and you could help us with the labor, some of it, like taking the tools inside the village?
They love that.
They come and help us.
Then it's like, hey, if we want to get a farming project started, can we empower you to do that?
We gave them some tools, we gave them some seeds, we gave them some banana trees, and they just ran with it, man.
And so, I don't know, I just love seeing that if you empower someone instead of treat them like a charity case.
If you give them an opportunity instead of saying, you can't do this for yourself, get out of the way, I'll do it for you.
And one of the other villages that we call it Mapinda, and it's, anyways, at first my heart sank because they really loved their, in nine of the ten villages, they really loved their huts.
It's very culturally important to them, the twigs and leaves.
But whenever I walk in onto their land, all of a sudden I saw huts that were just like the Makpala, just like the non-pygmies.
It was the mud huts that were, I don't know, four to six inches thick walls.
They had the leafed roofs, but they were much stronger houses.
And all of a sudden I'd come back, I'd gone back, and then all of a sudden to that village, what was important to them, the other one, the farming.
And yes, this village, also Mipenda, started farming for themselves as well, corn and beans.
But they started doing the huts because they were like, hey, if we're really equal now, we're equal to our neighbors, then we can live in the same kind of houses that they have.
We can stay out of the rain better.
We can keep our kids warmer at night.
And so to them what was Of value to them was one of the reasons they get called animals and subhuman and other things is because of their twig and leaf huts.
And their neighbors will say they live just like animals or they live in a nest or different things like that.
Well, now this place is, now they have houses just like the others.
Because I thought they maybe had gotten pushed off their land and that the Makapala had taken the land back.
And we have strict agreements and paperwork and like stamped in the courts and law that, hey, this is the agreement that is going to be a peaceful way of doing this and we're going to help the community come up together.
So it'd be dumb of us to go in and say, we're just gonna help the Pygmies.
So we helped the community all together.
I thought these guys had gone back on their word, but then all of a sudden it was, whoa, they're living just like everybody else now.
To you or to me, okay, like you tell me that 5,000 people, 5,000 children die every day because of lack of water.
I can't get that in my head.
I mean, I know I... I'm trying.
I know it's horrific, but my head is like, what?
It's almost like there's no place for it.
It's moving around in my head.
You tell me your grandfather died.
I'm like, fuck, man.
Dude lost his grandfather.
You know what I'm saying?
It fits.
It makes sense.
You tell me 5,000 kids die every day because of a lack of water.
And I'm just blank.
I'm trying to find a place for it.
When you tell them that you are going to fight on Spike TV, and they're going to show a video of why you're doing this, and they're going to show a profile on you, do they understand what you do?
Do they understand that these people are going to see you?
And sometimes we'd put on little entertaining things where the pygmies would come around and I'm not going to wrestle one of those guys, but I'll wrestle some of our well drillers.
There's one guy that's at least 6'5 on our team.
And so I'm wrestling with them and throwing them around a little bit.
And I think Ben will tell them sometimes that, you know, hey, in the United States, he was a wrestler, he was a fighter, and people know who he is.
But for them, for a frame of reference, kind of like you're saying you don't have the frame of reference for 5,000 kids dying every day.
I don't think they really have a reference for professional sports, television.
I've never met a Mabuti Pygmy that has a cell phone, that has electricity.
I've met someone with a flashlight, or a couple guys with a flashlight.
That's like the cool dude.
Yeah, absolutely.
And we've left behind some of the cheaper radios, and they can get two stations or one.
But for them, I mean, soccer, I don't even think they really know that that's a professional sport.
Maybe they do, but they don't have a reference because they don't know any of the players.
They don't watch any of the games.
They know kick a ball around.
And a lot of times it's just in a big circle.
But there's...
I should not misspeak because there's a couple places that...
With Makpala, they have some teams and have some fields and stuff, but that's only in two of the places.
Other than that, it's just a circle and you kick the ball around.
So no, I wouldn't say that they...
They have a reference for what I'm trying to do for them, but that's not what it's about for me.
No, I know it's not about that for you, but for them, it's got to be so odd.
This guy, the first white person they've ever seen, and there's a video of you that was going around Reddit a long time ago of you meeting them and them touching you and they can't believe you're white and they're freaking out.
But this guy who shows up out of nowhere, like a mythical creature.
If no one else could ever reach them, and if you stopped going there, and if all contact with the outside world ceased, you would be like a part of their religion.
I mean, do you understand that?
You'd be like some Jesus Christ type character that comes out of nowhere.
Some magical man from another world who shows them how to get water, who loves them and cares for them.
Here's a video of you where they're grabbing you and touching you.
No, I mean, I know you don't know about that because you're humble and you're not looking at it like that, but just the sheer perspective...
For them to be living in that world where their number one concern is feeding themselves parasites, trying to get some clean water, and some guy comes from a place on the other side of the planet, and this guy does this thing called mixed martial arts, and he fights, and they broadcast it on television, something they've never seen before in their life.
And with the pygmies and the makpala that's there, most of them, even our well-drilling team, everyone is fascinated with my body hair, the arm hair, because they don't have arm hair or leg hair, and then I'm just covered in it.
I just can't imagine how odd it must be to them and they don't even really know how odd it is.
Like for them to not have the preference of television, not understand, like if you could take them, I mean if Spike TV wants to really make an impact, what they need to do is go to the Congo, take some of those little fellas and fly them out to your fight.
Yeah, sometimes I think about it and I think it would be awesome.
Other times I think about it and I think it would be torture.
I don't know.
Maybe that sounds crazy, but also like giving them a place where all of a sudden they have everything at their fingertips and take them into a grocery store.
And then they missed their family right away.
Taking them out to go to Benjamin or Laryngo's wedding, they started missing the forest, like deeply missing their friends and family.
Deeply missing.
I've never seen it before, getting so homesick for something in two or three days.
I was on a reality TV show called The Ultimate Fighter when I was 21. It was the main event at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas when I was 23, and that was what I always thought was going to be my significance.
unidentified
My purpose was to be a champion fighter, if I could be that.
Why should these sweet, loving, amazing people be literally thought of and believed to be animals whenever they're these sweet, loving, amazing people?
And so if there's something we can do, if there's something I can do, I'm going to do it.
I was fighting against people, but really I was just supposed to be fighting for people.
And even whenever we feel like the last ounce of strength is leaving, we still got to choose to fight.
And we'll see something amazing happen.
I've seen people set free, bro.
I've seen people set free.
unidentified
My name is Derek Watson and I'm a filmmaker and this story has dramatically changed my life.
What inspires me about Justin is here's a guy who's at the top of his game and he leaves everything behind to go and serve and love someone else.
So we really want to tell the story through film because it's a story that really can inspire an entire audience to fight for something other than themselves and to fight for freedom.
So what I love about Derek and I choosing the crowdfunding route and being on Kickstarter is that we get to involve passionate people to be part of the story, be part of the solution.
And that's why we're inviting you along.
We could have gone different routes for funding, but we wanted to involve people in this process.
This is an awesome opportunity to really give my Pygmy family a voice.
And that was my first promise that I gave them, that I could try, at least try to give them a voice.
And now I'm asking you, help me, help me Give them a voice.
unidentified
So this Kickstarter campaign really is trying to help us get just the hard cost for this film to finish it out.
Things that you have to do to get a film out on the biggest stage possible, that's what we're asking you to do.
So this money is not going to me as the filmmaker.
I am literally giving up all of my time and the time of my production team for free to do this because we really believe in the story.
And we hope you do too.
And we're going to have some amazing kickbacks.
We're going to be talking to you guys.
We want to make sure that you guys feel as involved as we do as the filmmakers and as Justin does as a subject in going down this journey with us.
So you may be asking, why don't we just give money to Fight for the Forgotten, which is Justin Wren's organization that he works with.
The answer to that is, yeah, that would be awesome.
In fact, if you feel like that's what you want to do and you want to give directly to help free pygmy slaves through water, I would say go for it.
Absolutely.
Go to fightfortheforgotten.com and give there.
Think of this though as an opportunity to see just a dramatic impact in the lives of the pygmies and honestly in the lives of our audience as well.
So that's this project and we hope you get behind us.
When you decided to get back to MMA to try to bring awareness and try to bring more attention to these people, how long had it been since you had trained?
And I only really started training two or three months before I went this last time, which was 10 weeks ago.
And then I've been training this entire camp too.
Well, the last 10 weeks or so.
But it kind of was crazy.
They bumped me up on a card quicker.
And so from going to the Congo to celebrate the 20th water well, plus like visa issues, they wanted to try to take it because they're corrupt.
My five-year visa.
And they were trying to take it like how so yeah, they so when my wife and I left Congo last time Or basically they marked it down.
They wrote it down That we left six months earlier than we had no nine months earlier than we had and I have to go back at least every 11 months To check in to show them like hey, I'm I'm actively coming into Congo and doing stuff and So, all of a sudden, my time, they said, literally, I got a call, and it was from the university and from our team, the drillers, and they said, F.A., we heard that you're going to lose your visa in three weeks.
I was like, what?
Why?
They're like, go look at your passport.
Did they write down the wrong date?
And so they literally wrote down the wrong date of me, my exit visa.
Just so that they could try to get another $1,200 or $1,400 out of me for a new visa.
And I would have lost it.
And when I went in, they would have a way to say, Oh, you came in illegally and you lost your passport and your visa.
And we're going to arrest you and try to get even more money out of me.
And when I got my visa the first time, literally, I didn't have a passport for over three months in the Congo.
I had to send my visa or my passport to the capital.
And people I didn't even know, I still have never met, were handling my passport while I'm in the forest.
Yeah, he's got an organization there and is trying to do some stuff.
And Angelina Jolie goes there and helps rape victims.
But when the rebel group came in, the military and police that are supposed to protect it just ditched their guns, ditched everything and ran away.
And like, I don't know, a small portion just turned over to the rebels and said they were already rebels.
Anyways, the Congo military is basically comprised of former rebel groups that disbanded and came on with the government.
And so there's like 38 different war warring rebel groups in just the eastern Congo.
I think I think it was BBC in New York Times.
I'm not sure which one said which but they call it the rape capital of the world and hell on earth for a woman Because a stat had come out in like 2012 Or 2011 that said, one woman every one minute is raped in the Congo.
What made you decide to go with Bellator and not go back to the UFC? I talked, my management and everything talked with the UFC. I would say that, man, that's a great opportunity, obviously.
I love the UFC. It's great, great, great.
Even you helping support the water wells and Nate Marquardt.
I don't know if I said that last time, did I? But from one of his performance bonuses...
That's like a legit possibility right and I would this is what I Like to look at it as in me for my wrestling background and in fighting sometimes you get you You don't get this perspective, but from a wrestling background, you think of a podium, and the champ's at the top, and then there's, you know, normally there's the top eight or All-Americans or whatever.
It's a podium of eight guys.
And I look at it as, man, I want to get on that podium, and eventually I want to get to the top.
I want to get to the top of that podium, be the guy at the top, the champ, because if I'm there, I have a bigger voice, a bigger voice for my family.
So I mean people will look people will watch if I'm on the podium and I guess they already are because of You know you and great people that are getting behind the story that see that it's important, but I know that the better I do in fighting The more people will listen and I know that's cheap and shallow At times there's nothing cheap or shallow about that at all.
Man, whenever I look at it because of the team that we've lined up, man, the 17 full-timers we got now, about to have 20, each and every one of those people on that team, like, they are such fighters, and they're so giving, and they're so selfless, and they'll go live in the force year-round.
And drill wells and teach farming and teach all this other stuff.
So we've got a team of such great people and we've had to let guys go that just weren't with it.
We went through 20 people before we finally got to our team that we have now.
We're looking at ways how we can, there's no like healthcare system or insurance there, so we're trying to figure out how we can really set up our team that they're giving so much of their bodies, you know, like their health, their time.
We try to feed them really well out there, but still it's not as good as being in a city or town.
The four labs told me I didn't have malaria until I was almost dead.
And then I got out into Uganda and they're like, they either said 60 to 70 or 65 to 70 percent of my bloodstream was parasites.
In Congo they didn't they couldn't see it at all So sometimes like well like our head guy We you know his wife was actually poisoned like people can be just wicked there and mean Somebody tried to poison his wife and kill her did did poison it didn't didn't kill her but I almost did she was she was in a coma because they were jealous and Literally, it was just jealousy.
They first tried to get...
I'm not going to say their names, but first tried to get our guy and then went after his wife because they knew that if they could get her, then it would affect and hurt him.
And so we've sent her to Uganda for treatment and Kenya for treatment, and I think they've maybe gone through Tanzania, but...
But it's been months and months.
She has been partially paralyzed on one side of her body from it and is learning, going through rehab, everything else.
So there's lots of stuff with health.
And so we want to try to see how we can love on our team that's given so much.
Like, hey, whenever you guys got a health thing, let us know.
And we want to take care of it.
So that's what's awesome.
The backing of Water 4, they're all in.
Yeah.
Honestly, whenever I first got back, I was like, how am I going to do this thing?
How am I going to do it by myself?
And because that's how it's kind of been.
I mean, I got a lot of support after being on the show and lots of people were behind it.
But when it comes to like the business side of it and filing with US government and all that other stuff is like, man, I got a CPA. I got other people got my board, everything else.
But I'm like, man, all I want to do is go there.
Be there with them.
Fan the flames.
Teach them stuff.
Love on them.
And then when I come back here, I need to come on things like this.
Speak about it.
I need to train.
I need to fight.
I need to win.
But I don't necessarily need to do all the business side of things.
So anyways, Water 4 has been awesome on getting behind us in that route.
Josh Burns has fought for Bellator five times, I think.
Maybe six.
But I think this is a six fight in Bellator.
He's a tough guy.
He hits hard.
He's a finish or get finished guy.
His record's only, I think, like eight and eight.
So, the kind of...
I mean, he goes out there and either crushes guys or he gets crushed.
That's my plan, go in there and crush him, even though I hear he's a stand-up guy.
I've had so many people, even his friends, messaging me saying how great of a guy he is as a person, and that it's kind of hard for them to root against him or things.
So it's cool I'm going to fight a good dude, but he's got to go down because...
There's a lot more writing on it for me.
There's so much more at stake now than ever before.
Anyways, but how they can contribute is, man, fightfortheforgotten.org.
Fightfortheforgotten.org.
I think later today or tomorrow, also.com will be there.
Right now it's the old site on.com, but the new, improved site is fightfortheforgotten.org.
The book, I mean, I think people can really, I mean, from our talks, this is the deepest people can see into what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and my heart behind it so far.
But on September 15th, it's 28 chapters of this stuff, and I go into it real deep.
I literally can't tell you how many people from airplanes That I sit next to someone from San Diego that's watched it and someone at the hotel and just all over the place, man.
I walk around and people are like, oh, it's Justin from The Joe Rogan Show.