Haver & Boecker took part in the worldwide tender for the packing and loading system with four ROTO-PACKER lines – and won!
One clause of the extensive contract stipulated that the future Algerian operating team should be trained in Germany for four weeks. So 15 Algerians came to Oelde with their future packing manager Ibrahim. Ibrahim was still a very dynamic young man. The fact that he had virtually no teeth at the top or bottom – a situation he obviously seemed to suffer from – did not befit his wiry appearance. We decided to collect points from Ibrahim by helping him to get a set of teeth during his stay in Oelde. And so Peter Kobrink, a member of the Order Processing team, went to regular sessions with Ibrahim at a dentist in Oelde as a translation. At the end of the four weeks, Ibrahim proudly said goodbye with his new teeth to his Haver trainers and some of the pub landlords in Oelde.
When Wolfgang Haschke and Haver representative Pierre Chappuis visited the Meftah plant again about a year later, they immediately noticed that Ibrahim was again without teeth. When asked what had become of his Oelde dentures, Ibrahim replied: “I got a good deal selling them.”
Even without Ibrahim’s teeth, the acceptance of the packing plant in Meftah went to the complete satisfaction of the state-owned cement company. This was Haver & Boecker’s first reference installation in North Africa. Numerous orders from Algeria even led to the temporary opening of a local office with Alfred Boch, a Haver & Boecker fitter who spoke fluent French.
