Updated Prayer Points

We were really blessed to get to pray with a small group from Early Church (in Harrisonburg, VA) last night and wanted to share with you some of the specific requests we shared.

- Karen’s health (allergies with sneezing, runny nose, dizziness)

- relationships with our supervisors and good communication in our team

- wisdom in cultural tensions (security – outreach, self-care – engagement)

- our marriage relationship, coping with stress, grace with each other and ourselves

- learning French

- Congo as a country, especially with upcoming Presidential elections

- protection – physical, spiritual, relational

Thank you for standing with us

Reflections on first field trip (part 2)

We visit 20-something year olds who have been trained in conflict resolution skills and entrepreneurship. They each have their own small business, selling drinks, gasoline in bottles, snacks.

Don't ask what I'm doing with my arm. I think I was resting it on my hip/ airing out my armpit

We visit a field high on a hillside overlooking vibrant green landscape with pockets of white tarp roofs of refugee camps. The potatoes grown here will go to feed those who reside in the camps and some of the residents also make a small living working in these fields.

We visit a club for teenagers to learn about how to address school and community conflict, encouraging them that there is a better way than violence and that they can be the generation to make a change.

We visit a crowd of people working together in community gardens, growing food they will eat and profit from in their agricultural co-op, re-learning how to trust each other and work for the common good.

Sweet pink leather jacket bought in the market for the cold ride on the motorcycle.

We change our plans of where we’re going because there is fighting on the road we had planned to take. The government army is trying to seize minerals collected by local miners. We watch from the doorway of our hotel as the army passes through the village, knowing that the miners rushed on another road to take out a bridge so the army can’t pass. Five locals are killed in the fighting. This is the work.

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Everywhere, people are surprised to see me, a white person, “Mzungu”. Babies are afraid of me, children ask me for cookies “bis-kwi”(biscuits), women chide me for not buying whatever they’re selling, men say I’m their woman, and moto drivers fight over who will get to drive me. I’m so tired of being yelled at “Mzungu!” A friend encourages me, reminding me that they are not intending to be rude but are just curious and their few experiences with white people are usually humanitarian organizations coming to give them something, not to build relationships.

I struggle to say simple sentences in French, sometimes getting the words out but they’re so choppy, Serge still has to interpret what I’m trying to say. I sleep under a mosquito net, in a room at the Catholic priests’ compound, in a dark hotel with one pit latrine for the clients and a door that is closed by rotating a bent nail. I ride, walk, bounce, and look, always trying to take in what’s around me, what it would be like to live here.

I am wrestling with how to love others in this context. They see me as so different in skin color and privilege. What is their faith like and how can we mutually encourage each other when our daily struggles are so different? Do I really believe that God is working here and that He is the Good Father to these orphans, displaced people, widows and single mothers, hard-working women and men, drunkards, combatants, fellow humans?

Trip to “the field” (part 1)

I recently returned from my first round of visits to the communities where our Seed participants will be working. Since I didn’t know where these places were prior to going, I doubt that you’re very interested in the name of each village or have a map that is detailed enough to show the names. So instead I’ll share some general observations, some of them very random. And I'll break up my reflections into a couple of posts.

Reaching each location requires a long time on a bumpy, muddy road – sometimes in a Land Cruiser, sometimes on a motorcycle. Erosion is a problem on these roads through the hills. – sometimes part of the road has fallen down the hillside, and sometimes the road has 10 foot walls of earth on either side. There is a lot of wear and tear on the vehicle each time it makes a trip into the field!

It rains on and off as we travel, and activity mostly stops when it’s raining. People put their pans out to catch water off the roofs so they have to carry less from the water source. Some find shelter under a piece of plastic or big banana leaf. Animals who are tied on a short rope look miserable. As we pass by one house, a small girl stands in the doorway and sticks her hand out to feel the rain. I’m encouraged to see someone delighting in the rain in a way that is familiar to me, someone who was not cold and miserable because of it.

We ascend through beautiful, green hills, in the process of being stripped of trees – stumps everywhere – and reach the highest hills, which are incredibly green, covered in fog, and full of cows that belong to the president, who lives 1000 miles away. He makes profit on all of the cheese and beef that is managed and sold from this remote region in Eastern Congo.

En route to one site, we are behind a convoy of five World Food Programme trucks bringing food to these communities that are in some of the greenest, most fertile parts of the world.

Women carry so many items and such huge bundles! Firewood and water, of course, but they also carry anything they are selling and sometimes are even hired as porters. All items are tied in colorful fabric and the weight is born with the head/neck/back. Often they also have a baby tied on just above the bundle. And sometimes the women who are a little better off carry only a purse but still carry it on their heads J. And on a related note, very small children (think 4-year-olds) often are carrying babies on their backs, too.

It smells like smoke from the cooking fires, specifically smoke like beef jerky smells.

Mark's job in DR Congo

I am working as an attorney for the ECC (Eglise du Christ au Congo) on election-related issues.

The ECC is a very large entity in DRC. It is the umbrella organization of which all Protestant churches must be members. This is a government mandated thing that’s been around for over 30 years, and was the product of Mobutu’s method of rule. Whatever its origins, the ECC operates today as a gigantic entity. DRC has 70-85 million people (an actual census is not logistically/financially possible, that’s why I give the range) and 40 % of them identify as protestant.

One of the very interesting things about the Congolese constitution (from 2006) is that it requires that several governmental institutions be “accompanied” by various parts of civil society, including the ECC. Thus, for example, when the former head of the national electoral commission stepped down a few months ago, the ECC was consulted on who should replace him—because it’s constitutionally mandated that they be consulted.

Therefore, I will be doing work in the context of the ECC accompanying these various governmental entities (the national electoral commission, the national human rights commission, etc…) in their duties, so far as they relate to the elections. On a practical basis, this means that I need to know the laws governing those entities, and be able to apply them to decisions (or indecisions) taken by those institutions. I’ll write reports on that situation and the law, send it to my boss within the ECC, who will eventually add his edits and his thoughts and probably lots of other stuff that I don’t know because I’m new here, and send it on to the relevant governmental entity.

It’s important to note that the constitution doesn’t require every governmental institution to be accompanied by civil society. Thus, I’ll be doing the same kind of monitoring-like stuff for a few other governmental entities, but the relationship is a bit different.

What I just wrote above is the theory of what I’m going to do. But I have a hunch that it’s going to play out differently.

Last Friday I got to meet with two other ECC employees who are going to be helping me with this process. They suggested that the first thing we should do is to meet the different organizations that are already doing this kind of human rights/monitoring work, so that we can coordinate with them (which is a brilliant idea). They also said we should try to get a feel for what is going on in the provinces with these things. So they wrote an email to ECC office leaders in each of the provinces, and asked them to prepare a report on the situation of human rights in their region. This is very cool, but is already outside of what I was thinking I’d be doing, because it just feels so big and kind of administrative.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens. I’m very happy to be here working with the ECC. My coworkers are competent, diligent, and gracious followers of Christ, and I feel privileged to play a small part in trying to bring about the great vision they have for their country.

Karen's Note:
The ECC national office is, of course, in Kinshasa, and Mark has been spending a lot of time there as he's getting the specific of his job description worked out. We hope that once he's in the groove, he'll be able to stay in Bukavu most of the time.

And then it's April!

We went back to work on 05 Jan (Happy Birthday, Mom!) and one of the first orders of business was to sketch out our work calendar for the month to send to the rest of the MCC DR Congo team. I filled in January, and February too, since I already know. Then I realized March will be taken up with one main task, and, VOILA! It's April already. Wow.

Yesterday, on the VERY, VERY BUMPY road back from Ruchuru and Bunagana (on the border with Uganda), my mind was very busy. Some thoughts were:
- This situation is the climax of usefulness for the sip guard on my Nalgene bottle!
- Serge could do this job without me (as he speaks so many different languages and I hardly speak French), but he might quit because of all the administrative stuff that I enjoy doing.
- These houses look like images of coal mining towns in the 1800s because they're "clapboard" and there's black dust (here it's dried lava) covering everything.
- I feel so close to our dear friends, Micah and Betsy DeKorne, who are missionaries in Uganda with World Venture! Because I was very close, just across the border from Kisoro where they initially went in 2013.
- And, of course, a million job-related thoughts popping up about placements, policies, etc.

So I'm here in Goma for another week, visiting communities where we will be placing Seed participants with an organization for their two years as community development workers. Mark's in Kinshasa, getting his work of monitoring various governmental agencies regarding election stuff. (He's writing a post explaining himself what he does.)

And a brief story about our run-in with the police last Sunday.
We're on our way to church, both of us riding on a "moto" motorbike taxi, so with the driver. We just arrived at the paved road where we were going to get onto two motos. Police see us and stop our driver because he's not wearing a helmet. Then they decide that we are actually in trouble for riding two on the moto. We see three on a moto so often that we did not believe them when they said it's illegal to have three on a moto.

But they insisted and put us in a nearby taxi and got in to drive to the station. Mark and I tried to talk our best French way out of the situation. It's not going anywhere...yada, yada, yada, a lot of time (like 20 minutes) passes. We call my colleague Serge who comes to the rescue. He knows one of the policemen, hears our story, tells us it is actually illegal to have three people but, of course, they're just enforcing it because we're white and they can get a lot out of it, so we should just pay and go on our way. So we followed his advice and got to church, thankful to still have a pretty good attitude for the day but a little less eager to pass through that intersection again.

Then we exercised and visited friends and sent an email (Thank you for your prayers!) and felt better.

Rwanda retreat

Christmas Day was a bit of a downer, as Mark was sick and didn't even eat the fresh cinnamon rolls I made. Thankfully, we've been able to have nice Skype conversations with family, so that helps a lot.

But the day after Christmas surpassed normal day-after-Christmases with hiking in the national park where we had great views of extinct volcanoes then eating delicious ice cream made by nuns!

We received our resident visas so were able to cross the border into Rwanda for a little vacation time and have been very happy the past couple of days within eyesight of our house but enjoying Peace Guest House, English, nice roads, and lots of sleeping.

The weather here is so paradisiacal. (My spell check says that's a word!) And my hometown just got the snow of a century, breaking all kinds of records. Not trying to rub it in. But come visit!