| inbluevt | Date: Monday, 2013/09/23, 3:30 PM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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Quote An American mother journeys to a Congolese refugee camps to speak with mothers there about their hopes and dreams for their children and their war-torn country.
This was the year my two sons began to love superheroes. We popped in the Spider-Man DVD one night out of boredom and that was all she wrote. For the next five months we watched everything Spider-Man, Superman, Ironman, and Whoeverman we could. So, when I announced I would be making a special trip to the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to find and
record the stories of brave women living in what the U.N. calls the “most dangerous place to be a mother” their reaction was natural: “Mom, they are like superheroes.”
Why yes, boys—yes they are.
My journey into the heart of war-torn Eastern Congo began last summer at the suggestion of a trusted friend. To my husband’s credit, he whole-heartedly supported the idea of his wife traveling into a war zone. This, after all, is the man who delivered my Mother’s Day breakfast-in-bed with reading material titled “Congo: The worst place in the world to be a mother”. And I love him for that; he knows I don’t want to be the one that cringes at hard things, but faces them squarely armed with hope.
It was my husband that introduced our family to the great British abolitionist William Wilberforce, who famously said “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you
did not know.”
I first learned about the seriousness of the war in Congo years ago while living as a mom, with my two toddlers and my husband in Rwanda for World Relief. I learned that this war was regional, was complicated, was protracted and was considered by many to be hopeless. The whole region was one of those areas of the world to shake your head and click your tongue at. The
decades-long war in Eastern Congo is shaped by regional politics, ethnic rancor, and a greed surrounding the lucrative mineral mines. Currently, 64 percent of the world’s supply of coltan (used in cell phones, laptops, pagers, and other electronic devices) is found at the heart of
this conflict region. Columbite-tantalite, a metal ore that, when refined, can hold the high electrical charge necessary for creating the miniature circuit boards inside many of these same electronic devices, is no small character in the drama that is the Congo conflict. This cauldron of complexity affects the lives of families every day. It was through their struggle that I was to be changed. I saw the reality of their lives. I saw that almost six million people have died in this war, making it the most deadly conflict since WWII, and yet never making front-page news. To mothers, the casualties are husbands, sons, daughters, and parents.
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Message edited by inbluevt - Monday, 2013/09/23, 3:34 PM |
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