When you first see this video of Justin Wren getting his hair braided by Mbuti pygmies, it's hilarious. It's like a figure from Norse mythology crash-landed in equatorial Africa, just in time for an appointment with a freelance cosmetologist.When you know the backstory, however, the video stirs other emotions. In the five years since his last MMA bout and even longer since his turn on the tenth season of The Ultimate Fighter, Justin Wren bridged the distance from drug-addled mixed martial artist to magnanimous missionary. It's a journey chronicled in the book Fight for the Forgotten, co-authored with longtime MMA scribe Loretta Hunt and due out Sept. 15. And tonight, in his return against Josh Burns at Bellator 141, Wren fights with a new purpose: to help a marginalized people in Central Africa.Wren began as a standout high school wrestler who grappled his way to stints at the Olympic Training Center and Iowa State University, but painkillers intended to treat an elbow injury cascaded into an addiction that accompanied Wren all through his 10-2 MMA career, which included a split-decision loss at the TUF 10 finale. (Wren has said he snuck opiates into The Ultimate Fighter house.) Eventually, his substance abuse became so acute that it wiped away weeks-long chunks of his memory, and it led to him getting kicked out of his gym, the Grudge Training Center in Colorado.Soon after, however, Wren embraced Christianity. He got clean. He found meaning beyond fighting. By 2011, Wren was embarking on religious missions to impoverished parts of the Caribbean and Africa.During one such trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Wren developed a rapport with the Mbuti, one of various tribes of pygmies whose hunter-gatherer members grow to be less than five feet tall and who—even in a mineral-rich part of Africa where chaos and conflict isn't exactly scarce—suffer uncommon injustice. "The Pygmies are on the lowest rung of society; they aren't afforded any rights like citizens and have been enslaved by neighboring non-Pygmy tribes to work in their fields for generations upon generations," Wren wrote in an essay for NBC Sports. "Pygmies are paid for their labor in clothes or with scraps of food, like two small bananas or a minnow or two for an entire family." In addition, the area's marauding rebel armies have raped and cannibalized the Mbuti, while the pygmies themselves endure and often succumb to the effects of malnutrition and unclean drinking water."I saw that the shiny, gold belt I craved wouldn't solve my problems and that I had a bigger purpose," Wren wrote. "I was meant to love people and once I met the Pygmies, I knew that they were the ones I was supposed to love the most."Wren has since returned to the Congo several times, living and working among tribes of pygmies for weeks and months on end. Those trips have come with personal peril: During one yearlong stay, Wren suffered a bout of malaria and typhoid fever. (As soon as he recovered in Uganda, he returned to the pygmies.) But with help from groups like Water 4 and Shalom Drillers, Wren's nonprofit Fight for the Forgotten has so far aided in acquiring at least 2,470 acres of land and drilling more than 25 wells in eastern Congo, enabling a degree of freedom from the pygmies' oppressors.Now, for Wren, MMA and the plight of the pygmies are inextricably linked: by fighting in front of an audience, it raises the profile of a people that most of us might never hear about otherwise. And along with donations, Wren's fight purses and win bonuses mean more revenue and more wells for his dear friends in Central Africa. "I haven't stepped into the cage in five years, but I've never had so much motivation," he writes. "I'll fight with pride under the name my second family gave me, Justin 'The Big Pygmy' Wren."
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