ReBelgian Sisters prepare for Rebelle Rally

By Jennifer Halley, The Canby Chronicle

Imagine driving for eight days without a cellphone or GPS, using only a map and a compass to navigate your way across 2,500 kilometers through the desolate edges of California, Nevada and Utah. 

This gritty image doesn’t exactly conjure up inspiration for everyone. But it does for Katerina de Metz. 

In October, the Canby local and her sister Dani will jump into their Jeep Wrangler Rubicon and embark on the women's only Rebelle Rally, an annual off-roading event that tests about sixty-five teams’ navigation skills as they chase checkpoints hidden throughout a designated route. 

“So you’re given coordinates each day of the rally, and these coordinates lead to different checkpoints,” de Metz said. “You have to plot these on a map, and then you have to go and chase those checkpoints. The race officials give you a little tool where you can signal once you’ve found the checkpoints to let them know you’ve arrived. And then you go and find the next one.”

The teams consist of a driver and a navigator, and both have to be skilled in reading maps, guiding a vehicle across varied terrain and staying grounded in what can become extreme conditions, like getting a flat tire or becoming stuck in the sand dunes. Checkpoints are pinned by flags or with no markers at all. Each one is assigned a point system, with more points awarded for accuracy, and penalty points handed out for missing the mark or landing on another team’s checkpoint. To complicate matters, these checkpoints are only open for a pre-specified window of time. 

Every night, the teams gather at basecamp and pitch tents to sleep in. Even here, under the stars and outside of their vehicles, teams are at risk for a penalty. 

“We have to impound our vehicles so we can work on them for a couple of hours, but if we work on it for too long, we get penalty points,” de Metz says. “So there's only so much we can do. And then it has to be put away and we can't touch it until the next morning.”

The next morning comes swift with the shrill rattle of a cowbell and bleary-eyed participants unfurling their maps to plot the day out. By the end of the eighth day, whichever team collects the most points wins the rally. 

de Metz has never done anything like this. Neither has Dani. 

“My husband has been giving me latitude and longitudes, and then I plot them on a map,” de Metz said, similar to how the rally will operate. “And then we go find them. I do the same for my sister: I send her a couple of coordinates from the area, and then I tell her, ‘go plot these on a map.’” 

In August, the sisters will partake in a practice course in California called Rebelle University, where they will receive a crash course in navigation, driving and, on the last day, a chance to test their freshly-minted skills. 

Above anything else, this rally requires a certain level of precision to find a checkpoint’s exact latitude and longitude, and de Metz is a woman of precision. She is a biomedical engineer and heads several departments for OrganOx, a company that has transformed what liver transplants look like in the operating room. Instead of placing the organ on ice, where it slowly dies while waiting to be placed inside a human body, OrganOx’s machine perfuses the liver with blood-based perfusate at normal body-temperature. While the organ is on the machine it produces bile, metabolizes glucose, and clears lactate – essentially operating as if inside a body. 

“I’ve been there for four years and am responsible for clinical affairs, medical affairs, regulatory and training and education,” she said. 

Before OrganOx, she worked at Biotronik in Lake Oswego, where she  supported clinical studies and training on medical devices like implantable pacemakers and defibrillators. Her younger sister is a biochemist and works at Novartis. One could say their career choices have prepared them for this very moment. 

“This rally is more about being exact, being precise, being accurate,” de Metz said, “and that’s probably why my sister and I are so crazy about this. We’re like, ‘yea, this is totally our life.’”

The sisters are from Belgium. Dani still lives there, and de Metz immigrated to the United States 28 years ago. They see one another once, maybe twice a year. Neither of them have done anything like this before, and de Metz is looking forward to bonding with her sister in a completely new way. If they win, they get $2,500 toward a charity of their choice. 

Winners or not, the ReBelgian Sisters, their Rebelle Rally team name, have decided to start a fundraising campaign ahead of the race for the World Food Programme (WFP), a Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization that provides food for people displaced by wars and natural disasters. They wanted this experience to mean something bigger beyond their personal gratification. 

“I think we’re about $1,000 in it, or so,” she said. “I launched the campaign on May 28, which is World Hunger Day. I set up two webpages, one for the US, and one for Europe because we're expecting some help from Europe. The WFP is an organization that I think is really worthwhile.”

She was a teenager during the Live Aid concert on July 13, 1985, a dual-venue benefit concert held at Wembley Stadium in London, Eng., and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, Penn., to raise funds for the famine occurring in Ethiopia at the time. A few years after that concert, she remembers walking through a farmer’s market with Dani, and she turned to her and said, ‘we are so fortunate to have food and shelter and healthcare.’ 

“There was an impactful video shown during the Live Aid concert, and the music that was playing during that video was “Drive,’ by the Cars,” de Metz says. “And I heard that song again while we were thinking about what we should raise money for, and that all came back to me, and we both thought that WFP is really a worthy cause to raise money for. It's a little bit further from our personal stories, but at the same time, it is still very personal.”

de Metz is encouraging anyone interested in sponsoring The ReBelgians to contact her for more information. Or if they want to contribute to her fundraising campaign, to visit https://donate.wfpusa.org/page/WFPUSA_P2P_UNR?fundraiser=NMVBCFMP&member=SBHVKNJD.