Congo War

Providence: a few months ago, I began calling the church to work more closely with the school so we could break into the community with the Gospel.

I went over to the school to see if my background check went thru, and see where I could start working. Turns out that they have a student at the school who needs some tutoring, someone to help her along. They took me to the room, and it was Rosie! The daughter of Hugues Itoula! She doesn’t know English yet, and she lit up to be able to talk. She was sitting alone, looking kind of lost. How is it that the Lord leads us? Looking to break into the school, working with refugees from Congo, go to the school and be placed with one of the children!

Why are the Congolese refugees here? It has been a real learning process and has revealed a lot ignorance in my education! First, there are three Congos. The big one, the one whose Civil War we hear about most is The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, formerly Belgian Congo, The Republic of Congo, which was French Congo, and a smaller place called Congo Cabinda, which was annexed by Angola. Most of our families are from the former French Congo.

The people in the former French Congo elected their own gov’t in the 90s. The French had pretty much taken the oil from Congo, but the democratic gov’t wanted to be paid fairly for it. The French did not like that idea very much, so they sent some aircraft, soldiers, and brought in mercenaries from Angola and another country (maybe Mauritania? I couldn’t quite get it all from Hugues as he told me this sad story.) So they were bombed by the French Air Force and driven out by the army. Hugues’ father was involved with the democratic gov’t in some capacity, and if he goes back, the French-installed dictator will most likely kill him.

Did the French get a U.N. mandate for this? Maybe we should be more like the Europeans? I mean, they know so much about it.

One of Hugues’s sisters had polio years back. They had to flee on foot some 300 miles—sometimes they carried her, sometimes they pushed her in a wheelbarrow, and hid from the soldiers and airplanes when they came around.