Determined to live
Displaced by conflict in the DRC, families want
to go home Text and photos by Fred Otieno
S
itting on a sack filled with clothes in the back of a truck, 9-year-old Faustin flashed a smile. “I’m happy because I will have a chance to go back to school where we live in Rutshuru,” he said. “I hope to see my friends Antoine and Paul again.” The truck begins to move, perhaps marking the last time he will have to live in a camp for internally displaced people.
Faustin and his family were among some 140,000 people displaced last November around Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) when fighting between government forces and reb- els flared up in the North Kivu province. After M23 rebels conditionally pulled out of the area, some families began to return home. Peace talks between the government and the rebels began in December in neighboring Uganda, but fighting and lawlessness has continued to force people from their homes. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refu-
Otieno is the Kenya-Djibouti capacity building officer for the Lutheran World Federation Department for World Service, temporarily assigned to the Dem- ocratic Republic of the Congo program. Elizabeth Hunter, a section editor of The Lutheran, contributed to this article.
gees’ Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, the power struggle between the DRC government and the M23 forces has caused “massive population displacement and suffering.” Faustin’s family traveled back in a convoy of 11 trucks and 10 mini-buses that trans- ported the first group of 750
38 The Lutheran •
www.thelutheran.org
An unidentified woman balances two sacks of maize on her head with a child strapped on her back at a food distribution cen- ter in Goma, North Kivu Province.
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