The Story of the Woman from Bunia, Democratic Republic of Congo

Doug Smith served as a short-term volunteer with Global Ministries in Mbandaka, Democratic Republic of Congo with the Disciples of Christ Community of the Congo. During his time he met Marie Catherine Sauve Vie, a woman from Bunia, DRC which is in the Eastern part of the country where 6 million people have been killed since 1996 in a struggle for the mineral wealth of the country. He tells her story:

Wrinkled and hard, the woman looked 70; I did not know her age, only that she was a native of Bunia, the beleaguered city in the eastern Congo terrorized by rebels and its own nation’s army in recent years.  I met her in Mbandaka, the provincial capital of Equateur Province a thousand miles from her first home.  After returning to Bunia and finding that none of her family had survived and nothing else to hold her there, she had fled a second time to Mbandaka.

She represented the truth that I would have to contend with and describe on my return to the States. I met her the last night of my two month stay this summer in Mbandaka. Countless times prior to the trip I had been asked about the risk of revisiting the place I had lived for two years from 1969 to 1971.  My response had become something like a tape replayed again and again:  Mbandaka was far from the troubles in the eastern Congo and relatively unaffected.

To read the rest of the story, click here: http://afjn.org/focus-campaigns/promote-peace-d-r-congo/30-commentary/896–democratic-republic-of-congo-a-season-of-hope.html