Surviving A Cyclone In Samoa And Finding Purpose with Ian Reilly

Hello everyone, thank you again for joining us on another episode of the Source US show. Today's podcast is uh sponsored by your Douin Audio Group which inspires and uplift through discussions, testimonies and teachings, equipping listeners for meaningful conversations. On today's episode of the Source US show, we have Ian Riley, who survived a massive cyclone and some more with his wife has a without power, no food, massive culture shock, and used faith counties. And that turned into a life-changing experience into the powerful book encounter. He later invented game-changing technology, founded Arkansas, and he created the first world's first virtual cattle fence and sold the company. Now retired, he paints mentors and shares the story. Readers are calling good and King Beautiful and I opening. Ian, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Choosing Overseas Service In Samoa

Yeah, well, great to be here.

What inspired you to live a stable life to volunteer overseas?

I think there were several things. One was that as Christians we were interested in mission and specifically mission in overseas aid work. And we also wanted to experience a different culture by living within it. And as Christians, we wanted to serve. And so we did quite a lot of training with World Vision, another organization here in Australia, and about cross-cultural work. And they suggested we apply for this particular program. So the Australian Volunteers Abroad Program then was essentially the equivalent of the US Peace Corps, where, you know, anyone could go and they would find a place for you to work. In our case, the philosophy was that you would live and work like a local, so on a local salary and in local conditions. And so we were employed by a church in Samoa because it was a church-run school, and we were paid a Samoan wage and lived in a house just like every other Samoan teacher. So we thought this would really give us the opportunity to practice, you know, our own faith in living with and working with the world's poorest people and and living learning to live like them. So although we were well paid by Samoan standards, we paid we were earned less than 10% of what we were earning in Australia. It was a very significant drop in salary. But at the same time, there was also a very significant drop in expenses. There wasn't much to spend money on in Samoa, mainly food, travel. Yeah.

What was it like with the cake loan and the storm that you had to go through during that time with the you know with your wife and and whatnot? Tell us about that.

Cyclone Survival And Immediate Aftermath

Yes. So you can imagine we had never been overseas before. And so for us it was a big step to go overseas to to live, but also to go to a develop you know, what was then called a least developed country. So many of the people in Samoa were classified as the world's poorest. They would have an income of a few hundred US dollars a year. So it was a bit of a shock when we first arrived to see to see that. So that was a bit of a shock as well. And we were quite sort of uh fearful of getting diseases which were quite prevalent. One of them is uh dengue fever, which is quite severe and and can kill you. And so and we were worried about drinking, you know, water that wasn't clean, and we were trying to sort of protect ourselves and do all the right things. And then within two weeks, the cyclone came and just destroyed everything around us. Our house, I kept the roof on, but the for three days the wind blew rain horizontally through our house, in one side and and out the other. It was uh, you know, they were a hundred mile an hour winds gusting, blowing through the house. So you can imagine everything. We were wet continuously for three days. And fortunately, we were there with friends that we we only just made. So several of them were US Peace Corps volunteers. So one was from Ohio and the other one was from Minnesota, and they were girls who just finished college, and then there were a bunch of other people from around the world, from the UK and the New Zealand, and then the local Samoan teachers we were getting to know as well. So we we managed to go through the cyclone, but after that, you know, the road was gone. The main road to the airport had been washed away. There was no we had no water because our water came from a spring that was pumped by an electric pump, and with all the power gone, there was we had no water, and we were down to, you know, the last tin of beans. And so we went into the shops to to buy some food, but then the banks weren't open, so we couldn't get money. So we were pooling at US dollars and New Zealand dollars and Australian dollars to try and get enough money to buy enough food for the next couple of days. But gradually, you know, things we gradually got things working again. It took it took twelve months before we had reliable power. Yeah. So I think it was actually after the initial shock of the cyclone, I think it was the living through the aftermath and the recovery that was much harder.

Yeah.

Why They Stayed To Help

We were trying to teach our high school and the school had no water. So you can imagine that being in the tropics with eight hundred students, teenagers, but no water. Yeah. It was quite difficult. And no no no equipment, just chalk and a blackboard.

Yeah. What made you and I'm assuming you s you still stay there, you know, you said you stay there for an additional year without power and everything. What made you can continue to stay there even when you know you you could have said, hey, let's go home?

Communication Without Internet Or Mail

Yes. And many d many did. Many people in some uh expats, you know, they said, right, that's enough. I'm heading home. No, we you know, we were surrounded by needs, desperate needs in many ways. And so for us, I think it was fairly unthinkable to go home. You know, it would be like abandoning all these students. They were all eighteen and nineteen and hoping to, you know, maybe get a job or maybe or if they were very bright, maybe even get a scholarship to a university overseas. And, you know, they people were rebuilding their homes and schools. So for us it was uh quite unthinkable that we would uh go home. We had to stay and and help. Help it would be abandoning our God-given calling. We thought that God had placed us there for that purpose. That was our focus, and that was what we were there for there to do, so we stayed. So the book, you'll notice on the front there's a there's a painting image there, which is a sort of collage of images that we took at the time about the cyclone and afterwards. So I've combined those into the this picture on the front, which I painted. And you'll see that there's a there's an army helicopter because the Australian Army and the US Army they arrived within two days and started to help rebuild. And one of our students sitting here and then the destroyed houses. And then over here in the center there's a there's a power line pole. So we actually walking on the first day when the wind was dying down, we walked down the road and I saw this power pole with uh the uh corrugated iron wrapped around it in the shape of a cross. So that image stayed with me, and I put that on the front of the of the What year did this take place? So this was nineteen ninety to ninety-one. Okay. So it doesn't seem very long ago to me, but it was was a while ago. Yeah. A lot of young people, you know, they they don't understand that there was no internet then. So you couldn't find out any information. And we were relying on for news on shortwave radio to Australia or New Zealand. That was how we got our news.

Yeah.

Yeah. Shortwave radio. Yeah.

Was there muck new coming through that conclusion?

No. So there was news to say that, you know, you can imagine Samoa is recovering from the cyclone and the army has gone to help rebuild. So quite often it was news that we already knew, but it wasn't news local to Samoa. So we didn't know what was happening in the country around us. We had no idea. There was an a lot of gossip. So most of our news we got word of mouth from friends who heard it from someone else, who heard it from someone else. So a lot of it was very suspect, probably untrue, maybe true. We couldn't tell often what was tr right, what was true, what wasn't, what was real, what wasn't real. I relate in the book that one of the most difficult things is in Samoa living there was the degree of uncertainty that surrounds you in in a foreign country like that. Because, you know, the normal things that you're used to in a country like Australia or the United States or or say Britain, you know, where you you wake up in the morning and you have the television and it gives you the news, or maybe, you know, the the radio, and now we have the streaming and internet, and you know, you're flooded with this information. And even in 1990, we would get a lot of information. In Samoa that disappeared completely. That was just word of mouth, just what your neighbor told you. But it was a good experience because you know that's how most of the people in the world get their information heard from their neighbor or friend.

You know, like you're saying, you know, word of mouth and you know, hearsay and whatnot. It's almost like what it's almost like what Facebook is like nowadays with different news stories. Oh, you know, word of mouth or hearsay or gossip and nobody knows what's true or what's not true anymore.

Writing Encounter As A Thriller

Yeah, that's right. It's a very good analogy, you know. If you just relied on Facebook from your friends for news. Yeah. Without the pictures, though. Right. But you know, in many ways, there were things about it that were very efficient. So there were no telephones for us, and there's no mail service in Samoa for outside the capital. There's no you can't post a letter to someone in a village. You have to post it to someone who might have a mailbox, someone else. Yeah. So uh in order to communicate, we would write notes and give them to a student who was travelling to that village, and they would give that to the person in the village, and that person would write a note and bring it back the next day. So we would have next day response in Samoa to our mail, which you can't get in Australia by mail, you can by email now, but but we could get a a response back the next morning. We send a note maybe, you know, five o'clock in the afternoon, and then ten o'clock the next morning we have a a response. We have a letter back. Yeah.

Tell us a little bit more about your book and what the book is about.

From Engineer To Virtual Cattle Fencing

Yeah, so the I always wanted to to write the story of our rival and really share that with other people because it was a very, very hard experience, you know, to live through. But those experiences in life are the ones that often reward you the most. And so I really just wanted to share that experience with people and the lessons that I learned from that. Partly because those lessons stayed with me for the rest of my, you know, working life. And they really helped me later on when I was an international consultant. So I worked primarily in the Europe, in the US, Canada, and Japan, and then later in China and Singapore, Hong Kong. And so I was traveling crossing cultures a lot. And so my experience at crossing culture in Samoa gave me a lot of very valuable lessons in how to do that. So I really just wanted to share the story. I enjoy telling stories, and really my family, we're a family of storytellers. Both my brothers have have written novellas or half-written books, but not finished. So I sat down to write once I had retired from paid work, and it gave me the time to really learn the craft of writing and then focus on the book. So the book just covers the first few months of our time in Samoa, arriving and then the cyclone. And what it what I do is I try to give the people, the readers, the experience of being there and and seeing what I see. So I write down what I see in the book. It's all written in the present tense and what I'm thinking, and I let the reader then experience that and make their own judgment about it, their their own decision about it. So I don't very often give them answers or tell them what what what to think. I let them do the thinking themselves. They can be have the same experience reading the book and then decide for themselves what they would do in in that situation. Yeah. So it's also written I've written it with the pace of a thriller. So I I went and studied how say Lee Child writes his Reacher books and John Grisham and looked at how they wrote the book to be engaging and and and turn it into a page turner. And so I've written the book that way, and people do tell me that they can't put it down. They find it. They they just gotta keep reading the next page, keep reading. So it's very engaging in that way. Yeah.

How did you find your uh or found your the detec Archiking and your and your your presence as well?

So you might have gathered I'm I'm quite a creative person, and so I gravitated in my career as an engineer to uh product design, but we we designed really world-first products. So typically I would be introduced to some new breakthrough science from, say, a university like Harvard or Stanford or Cambridge, and they would then want to turn that new science into a product that someone could use. So it might be biomedical. I did a lot of work for biomedical companies in the Silicon Valley and on the East Coast in the what's called the Triangle in North Carolina, Raleigh Durham around Duke University, um around Boston, and then in Germany and Switzerland and the Netherlands, UK. So they would want this new product, and so we would work to design a product that a customer could use for that. So I did a lot of work on that, and over about 15 to 20 years, and then because I worked a lot with startups in the Silicon Valley, I had this idea for a virtual fence for cattle because I grew up on a farm and I understand the problems that farmers have. And our family comes from the outback of Australia, where the farms, you know, maybe 50,000 acres is a small place. Many farm farms 500,000 acres. Well. Yeah. And so they have trouble managing their cattle without, you know, it's very expensive to put up fencing. So so I thought of this idea and then I did some investigation and found that a a government research organization had developed some technology, and so I licensed that technology their patents from them and raised capital and and we produced and developed the product. It was very hard, you know. Running, launching a startup company is tough, particularly in the early days when it's just you're just one person doing it. But no, we raised about we raised about 25 million Australian dollars. So it's about 18 million US dollars in today's money, and developed the product. We started to sell it, and then our our largest investor, which was a a global agricultural corporation, they offered to buy the company, and so I I sold. Yeah. But we ended up we went from zero to sixty-seven employees at its peak in a matter of two years, which was quite a big jump, you can imagine.

Yeah.

How do you how do you stay open to or how do you stay open to opportunity when they feel getting or out of control?

Embracing Uncertainty As Opportunity

Yes. It's interesting question. Because you know, one of the things I learned in Samoa, because everything was chaotic and out of control often and very uncertain, is that uncertainty does create opportunity. When things are are locked in, when things are certain, if you think about it, there is no opportunity for change. You can't, you know, if if you have to be at a certain place in a certain time, and that's locked in your schedule and you you must be there, that cuts out opportunities to do other things. And I found with uncertainty, rather than be fearful of it, to embrace it, because quite often uncertainty provides for serendipity, you know, things happen that I think God has works in our lives to make happen. So in our, you know, uncertainty with the cyclone, for example, we found ourselves thrown together with people we didn't know. But those people became they became like family for us. All through our lives, they were like our American family because we were so close to them and we'd been through a lot together. And so, sure, you know, we're uncertain about who these people are, and we we only just met them in the middle of a cyclone, but they they became family. And one of those people, for example, when we traveled to the US, he was living in in DC, and he said, here, stay in my my apartment, here's the key. When you're finished, put the key in the in the post box. Just stay as long as you like. So that's the way I I see it.

Yeah.

Faith Tested Through Risk And Purpose

And embrace uncertainty.

How have DeGasting reshaped your understanding of faith and we g and we Yeah.

So one of the things I think, you know, we deliberately were going to some we were trusting God that He would would keep us safe. But the first thing that happened is a cyclone came. Feel felt very unsafe. But you know, again, God works through those things and he strengthened your faith and he brought us through that. And there are many, many other situations where things became desperately difficult, but we trusted in God. And certainly that strengthens your faith faith and your trust in to face the next difficult circumstance that comes up. And since then, you know, it's been one of those things that I think God continually tests you with if you step out in faith with with with more difficult things. If you think about it, in in 1990 we were prepared to trust God to go to Samoa and teach. And that was tough. But you know, if you'd said to me in twenty-five years you're going to launch a company and raise a million dollars and then raise another ten million dollars, and you're gonna have all these employees and and you never know and going to know one day to the next what's going to happen. I would have said, No, no, no, I'm never going to do that. But, you know, uh in 2014 I did that. Yeah. God gave us the courage, I think, and the faith to trust in Him to say, okay, well, this is this is a step that I can take. But it was a bit more than that. It was sort of this product doesn't exist, but if it did, it would really make a big difference to farmers around the world, a big difference to protecting the environment. There were so many benefits, and I thought, well, I've been doing these very difficult and breakthrough products now for twenty years. My view was that God had placed me there to to make this happen. That I was the person who who should do it, who should make it happen.

Well, as we get really the end here, we'd like to ask my guest, what is in a would have increased or would have wisdom that you would like to give to my audience.

Final Advice And Where To Buy

Yeah. I think for the Christians in the audience, I would say, you know, God calls us to be strong and of good courage, to take courage. Courage means facing things where, you know, you might you might suffer harm. It might is not going to be easy, but God calls us to have courage and step out in faith and do good things. You know, whatever that might be, stretch your faith with enough courage to do something and serve God. And for non-Christians, I think my message would be that, you know, li life has has purpose, but it has purpose because we have a a personal created God who made us in our own image. And so your life has purpose because God created you for purpose. So I would challenge them to find that purpose and find that purpose through faith in God. Amen. If you're lost and wondering why you're here, whether life is worthwhile, whether it's meaningful, it is, but you'll need to find that in God. Yeah. Where can people pick up your book if they would like to read more about your story? Yeah so uh Encounter is available online in the US at Amazon of course. Also Barnes and Noble both of those places yeah it's probably available elsewhere but those are the main ones people know and use. So Amazon Barnes and Noble Encounter a journey into chaos culture and compassion.

Great. Well Ian Raleigh thank you so much for coming on the show today. We greatly appreciate having you yeah thank you for having me.

It's been great. Great conversation.

Well guys and girls thank you so much for coming on and for listening. Please go and like and share this episode and follow up with uh Ian and check out his book and please go and follow Odury Audio Group on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, share review and even reach out at info at doy audiogroup dot org and until next time, God bless. Bye bye