Kyle Munson

kmunson@dmreg.com

ROCK VALLEY, Ia. — As Lisa Groeneweg’s fingers drum across her laptop computer keyboard, I imagine I can hear the thunderous trample of a parade of elephants.

It’s definitely my imagination. This is a small town of 3,500 in northwest Iowa. I’m in the middle of farm country sectioned off by fences, a landscape of row crops and livestock. And unless I took a very wrong turn, this is not the African wild.

Groeneweg, 51, is a former cattle farmer who has never set eyes on a live elephant — even in a zoo. She’s never left the continent.

The only elephants I spy in Rock Valley are miniature specimens carved from wood and other pachyderm knickknacks that decorate Groeneweg’s home.

But what this woman has built on behalf of elephants and other African wildlife from her rural solitude is remarkable.

“I’m sure all my neighbors think I’m a hermit and I have no contact with the outside world,” she chuckled.

Just the opposite: While reclined in bed with a Wi-Fi connection, she’s busy trying to squash a lucrative black market for al-Qaeda and other terrorists on the other side of the globe.

Three years ago, Groeneweg co-founded an ambitious nonprofit, Chengeta Wildlife, whose mission is to preserve and protect wildlife. She joined forces with an anti-poaching expert in Africa. They cultivated an international board of directors that includes British actor Josh Bowman (seen in the recent TV series “Revenge” and the upcoming “Time After Time”).

The major threat to these majestic African creatures is poaching. Terrorists and other criminals slaughter them to harvest their precious ivory, leaving behind a trail of unused, rotting carcasses.

Chengeta in its first year drew an average donation of about $40 from 26 different countries. In 2015 Groeneweg raised just over $83,000.

Despite a lack of formal executive experience, she has steadily grown the organization. She exploits unique opportunities — such as a recent $100,000 windfall from a billionaire’s son in California that she won by answering a question online. This cash infusion enables her and her two colleagues to begin to save some of the most endangered elephants in the world in the Western African nation of Mali. Chengeta will go to work in a war zone where the United Nations has struggled with its deadliest peacekeeping mission.

One more wow factor: Groeneweg has accomplished all this while simultaneously battling her own body. She staves off two deadly blood cancers (leukemia and essential thrombocythemia) with a daily regimen of chemotherapy pills plus an endless routine of medical appointments. She has enough energy in a typical day for only several hours of mild activity — which makes working from home with a laptop her ideal activism.

She never has left Rock Valley, where she was born into the Van Otterloo clan. She grew up among seven siblings and cherishes being surrounded by dozens of relatives in her hometown.

She considers her large family her “greatest treasure.”

“So I never could live anywhere else.”

But choosing to remain didn’t mean that Groeneweg wanted to isolate herself from the rest of the world, especially after she was diagnosed with cancer.

“I always thought I would do something to give back,” she said.

'She's got an imagination that works'

Groeneweg and her husband, Bruce, run their own trucking company. They haul ethanol byproducts to farmers who feed the corn syrup and wet cake to livestock.

The couple has two sons: Levi, 19, who works for a building mover, and Luke, 14, a high school freshman still at home.

"For her to do something a normal person does it just takes five times as much," Levi said. "It just drains her."

But he also sees how the work sustains his mom.

"It makes her feel like she has a purpose," he said, "and she’s doing something great."

Beyond all the steps that led to her nuclear family, two major decisions have shaped Groeneweg’s life.

First, she resolved to face her greatest fear.

Shortly after high school, she worked as a telephone operator at a candy factory.

In her next manufacturing job, she attached the button to the top of baseball caps. Groeneweg enjoyed the repetitive grind: She was able to let her imagination wander while she worked. .

She's a serial hobbyist always dreaming up new projects. She has taught herself everything from leather craft to masonry. She stores supplies in a hulking toolbox handed down from her auto mechanic father.

"She has a hell of a lot more talent than the rest of us," said Rick Van Otterloo, 54, Groeneweg's brother. "She's got an imagination that works."

But early in life, Groeneweg also was painfully shy. She got sick of feeling that way and as an antidote decided to leap headlong into what scared her most: technology and computers.

She enrolled in the local community college, studied for three solid years and in 1989 earned a degree in applied computer programming.

She oversaw the operating software for 70 banks around the Midwest. When that job was shipped out of state, she became a bookkeeper for a dozen local businesses.

When her sons were born, she veered into massage therapy with her sister to be able to work out of her home.

Groeneweg and her family also spent 15 years on a farm outside of town. With her husband busy trucking, she tended to the 400 head of cattle until her health began to fail. The family moved back into town.

Her second major decision: Groeneweg wanted to become a force for good before it was too late.

She was 39 when she felt the swelling in her side, near her stomach.

She was always tired and quickly shed 40 pounds

A bladder infection finally convinced her to visit the doctor, where she expected bad news.

Groeneweg's grandmother died from stomach cancer. And she’s among four of five sisters who have been diagnosed with cancer of some form.

“The worst part was having young kids,” she said of the emotional toll of her diagnosis. “I wouldn’t be there for them."

Fortunately, a drug pioneered just years earlier had made Groeneweg's chronic myeloid leukemia a manageable condition.

But she remains in fragile health. At the end of last year, she ended up in the emergency room with a blood clot in her spleen that destroyed part of the organ.



'Determination, goodwill and absolute dedication'

It was November 2013. Groeneweg was browsing Quora, a social media platform meant to crowd-source good answers to serious questions, when she stumbled onto Rory Young, She was moved by his dramatic background and his perceptive, heartfelt views on how human greed was decimating his homeland's native wildlife.

Young, 44, was born in Zambia, grew up in Zimbabwe and began tracking lions around age 10.

He became a wildlife tracker and anti-poaching activist, he says, out of a sense of obligation. .

“My professional and my social environment have been torn apart by poaching,” Young said when he and Groeneweg connected for a Skype call during my visit to Rock Valley.

He has long since gotten too good at his job. Young has struggled against not only poachers but corrupt government officials who help enable them. He, his wife and two children (ages 9 and 7) now live in the Netherlands, with Young making trips back into Africa for his work.

When Groeneweg first reached out to Young with an offer of help, he said that he immediately sensed that she was earnest. But would she follow through?

"With my work, you get a lot of interest," he said. "And generally — I don’t know, you Americans use the word 'flaky,' is that it? So I’m used to a lot of 'blah, blah, blah,' as the French say.”

But they quickly forged a close partnership that Young attributes to his novice co-founder's "determination, goodwill and absolute dedication.”

Groeneweg, meanwhile, early on was able to see hours and hours of proof of Young's work for Chengeta as he roamed Africa with a GoPro video camera strapped to his body.

"Chengeta Wildlife" was incorporated in February 2014 in Iowa. "Chengeta” is a Shona word that means “to look after or take care of.”

Young, with his expertise on the ground, trains African park rangers and even military how to protect their own wildlife, continually compounding the effect of the small nonprofit. Groeneweg in her unpaid role handles the infrastructure — everything from producing videos to the crucial fundraising that has drawn donations as humble as $1 from her great niece. A month-long training session for a group as large as 40 can cost more than $35,000, including travel and daily food rations.

Chengeta has tried to spread its ethic even farther by publishing its own first-of-a-kind “Field Manual for Anti-Poaching Activities."

Despite all this work coordinated online, Groeneweg and Young have met only once, in September in Boston.

“It felt like I was meeting a family member,” Groeneweg said.

Her success with digital outreach includes that $100,000 donation: She earned that simply by answering a Quora question from foundation head Brent Noorda of California and receiving the most online votes.

Noorda is in the process of awarding his family fortune to charity: "I believe that wealth inheritance is not in the best interest of society, and so I must give away my recent inheritance," he wrote. "Tell me where to give $100K in 2016 (be very precise) and why, or upvote your favorite answer. The collective wisdom will decide."

Groeneweg provided a clear, detailed answer full of urgency for the African rangers killed weekly in the line of duty and the elephants slaughtered at a rate of one every 15 minutes.

While Mali has a much smaller elephant population compared to other parts of Africa, Young said. These beasts are unique.

“These are the last elephants of the Sahara,” he said.

Only now are Mali's elephants being tested for their distinct genetic properties. And they have managed to endure in a complicated, unstable country.

“In the midst of all of this, there’s these few hundred elephants still surviving among this war, inter-ethnic conflict, rebellion, insecurity, breakdown of rule of law and order," he said.

Chengeta's work may be made easier in the year ahead by China's recent pledge to shut down its ivory market, the world's largest.

Young heads to Mali within the next few weeks to tackle the supply side of the problem. He will conduct training just west of a camp where last week a suicide bomber killed at least 50 people and injured dozens more.

Groeneweg will continue her support from Rock Valley, where she qualifies as perhaps the most globally active hermit in small-town Iowa.

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/KyleMunson. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (@KyleMunson) and on Snapchat (@kylemunsoniowa).

Chengeta Wildlife

The Rock Valley-based nonprofit dedicated to fighting poaching in Africa is online at chengetawildlife.org and facebook.com/chengetavalley. Or call 712-470-5182.