Thursday, June 7, 2012

Amid Congo's chaos, hope lives

From The Congo and Virginia-

THROUGH THE window of our tiny charter plane, it looked like a sprawling city on a picturesque lake. From a distance, it could have easily passed as the Swiss foothills of the Alps.

But as we flew closer, Goma began to reveal more of its troubled self.

The roads were dusty and rutted, the land mostly barren. The streets were teeming with people. And what had appeared to be houses were little more than makeshift huts. The sides of the runway were littered with the carcasses of rusty airliners.

This is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the slice of central Africa made famous for Westerners by Joseph Conrad's chilling novel "Heart of Darkness." Yet for all of the Congo's otherworldly challenges, my two colleagues from the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia and I learned during a week in May that good things are happening there.


More here-

http://fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2012/062012/06072012/705495

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