Earthquake in Bukavu and surrounding rural villages

Two earthquakes (magnitude 6.0 and 5.0) hit the Bukavu area yesterday. Read about it on BBC. Please pray for our staff in Bukavu as well as for the families of the children at our school.

Here is an email from Mudekereza, our Congo Director that came in this morning to Don Rogers (ELI Intl. Director):

Dear friends,

It was 9.30 am when we dropped the children at the church. As we alighted, the earth was shaking like we have never seen before; it was a strong earthquake.

We looked in the air and saw dust covering the sky above our heads; several building walls (including church buildings) were falling down around our church.

My wife, our newborn baby and some of our other children needed to be at home for various reasons. As I entered the church because I was to speak, I saw my nephew coming my way; he was scared. I asked what was going on. He said several building in our area had collapsed. I asked what happened to my wife and the children. He said the building was still all right. I drove back home and found that everyone including the little baby were outside far away from buildings.

Our two-year-old son was highly traumatized. He was just crying. He could not stand the shaking and up to this moment is crying and gets scared at every little noise.

My in-laws live in front of my house, in a school building, a very large and old building. They tried to run out of the building during the earthquake, my sister-in-law was trapped by falling walls and had a serious head wound.

Looking for her, we drove to the main hospitals and realized that many families have been affected by the unusual earthquake. She is in a critical condition.

The victims up to this moment has reached 5 people dead and about 200 wounded. As I am writing this email we have not been allowed to enter our homes, because even now there are buildings shaking. We are advised to spend the night outside which is difficult with little babies.

The government just said that the next 2 days there should be no office opening, or no-one should be near crowded buildings like in the market, because they say there are more aftershocks are to come. In neighboring Rwanda, 23 people are reported dead and more than 200 wounded. We need your prayers that God may be limiting the damages, console the affected families.

Thanks for praying!

Mudekereza

Hope Walks - Fundraiser for ELI Congo

~ Kierra Higgins, ELI Staff
~ photos (c) Micah Albert | ELI 2007



This past weekend, friends of ELI in the Sacramento area, with the help of some other organizations, put on a huge walk-a-thon for orphans and vulnerable children. The focus of the walk was to provide a way for kids in America to walk for kids in Africa. A lot of the proceeds from this walk were going towards our school in D.R. Congo.

The day was amazing! I think we had about 800 people walk (a mile and a half) and I know that a lot of hearts and eyes were opened. On the back of each walker’s number was a name and profile for one of our kids in Congo. It made it really personal for the people to walk and pray for a specific child as they walked. And after the walk, we had a letter writing station where they could write a letter to that child.



ELI's Micah Albert made a 30-minute video showing the kids and ministry in D.R. Congo and the seats in front of that screen were continually packed.


Micah, his wife Lindsay and an ELI board member's Bible-study group did an amazing job at creating ways for kids to experience what life is like in Africa. They had a tent that showed the difference between the bedroom of an American kid verses a house for a child in Africa. We also had a simulation classroom like the classrooms in Congo so that kids could experience what it might be like to go to school there. My mom even made ugali for them to try!

Among other exhibits, participants got to see an X-Box sitting next to 30 bags of rice and learn that the cost of one X-Box could feed a child in the Congo for 10 years! It was so fun to watch the kids and their parents experience all these stations and really have their eyes and perspectives expanded.

ELI Congo

From Davis and Jen's update after their recent trip to visit ELI Congo:

How do you describe Congo? The city of Bukavu is a perched on several steep hills at the south end of Lake Kivu. Its streets have disintegrated into a moonscape of potholes navigated by small cars smashing their under-carriages, the big SUVs of a dozen aid organizations, and fleets of military vehicles. The UN patrols the streets with truckloads of soldiers from Uruguay, Pakistan, China, and Indonesia, in Land Rovers with machine guns on turrets. The Congolese army is also in full force, rolling through the streets in their own trucks, with soldiers also making their presence known wherever people are gathered. You often see soldiers flying around the streets packed into their jeep-like Belgian army “bombardiers” with guns and Stinger missiles bristling out of the roll-cage.

Despite the constant reminders of war in this land, it was very peaceful. We never heard gunfire, or worried for our safety. The people were very engaging and friendly and we were able to communicate with them in Kiswahili quite effectively. The people are shorter than Kenyans and commonly wear tailored African clothing instead of the 2nd-hand clothing from the West so common in Kenya.

What was striking was the resilience of the people in a country that has seen the most deadly conflict since WWII. Besides the multiple rebel movements since Congo’s colonization and independence, Bukavu was most recently turned into a war zone when it was invaded by rebels in 2004. The city shows the marks of this instability. Besides the unreliability of the infrastructure—roads, electricity, water, etc. many government workers make use of their position to make their living, as their salaries often go unpaid. The result is that you can be asked for bribes every time you make any transaction with the government.

The other result is that businesses seem unwilling to invest significantly in any large scale business, so instead it is carried out by men on the street. We were surprised to buy fuel for the car in half-liter and one-liter water bottles. The price is negotiable. When we did go to a gas station, they did not have fuel. Money is also changed on the street by men with enormous stacks of Congolese Francs—notes so dirty and broken you are sometimes uncertain of the denomination.

The few stores carry shelves of liquors from all over the world to meet the demands of the city’s soldiers but very little variety in food. Milk is only available in dried form in cans, or in packages of long-life milk at a high price. One of the costs of war was the death of 3 million cows, making milk a luxury that is imported from Uganda.

Click here for some photos from the Congo.

Get a Goat

In a village region in Eastern D.R. Congo, three hours south of the country's second largest city of Bukavu, is an area called Chihonga. This 60-square-mile area contains 11 villages that roughly 22,000 people call home. Suffering from the wake of Interahamwe rebels fleeing the ’94 Rwandan genocide as well as from the Congo’s own instability and war, family life in Chihonga has been hit hard.

During the last 15 years of conflict, this area has been wrecked by rebels moving into the village raping women, killing families, and stealing crops and livestock. A culture that is completely dependent on cows and livestock has been completely stripped of its most important asset, and the landscape in the beautiful hilly region is almost completely void of any livestock. It is an eerie sight to behold.

ELI Congo moved into this area in 2005 with a micro-loan project that included co-op training groups which focused on gaining new skills in sustainable agriculture and replenishing the soil of much-needed nutrients. With the absence of life stock manure combined with already-low yield staple foods such as cassava, Chihonga residence have not even been able to eat once a day on a regular basis.

In November 2006, Mirhima M’Muyahula, a 25-year-old widow with four children, was one of the 105 recipients of the goat-loan program. Using her new goat combined with the training she received, she used a zero-grazing unit for the goat, bringing the food to the goat. This does not only fatten up the goat, but it also enables her to collect the manure and use it for her crops. Mirhima is, “…thankful for the training [she] received and [for] the goat.” Before she only had enough beans to feed her children maybe once a day, and now, only seven months later, she “has more beans than she knows what to do with.”

How will she repay the loan? By giving back the first baby of the goat. If she gets six more goats, she will be able to purchase a cow benefiting even more and having the opportunity to sell milk in the market.

Not even one year into the loan program, these 105 recipients lives have been changed through something as simple as a single goat. The true joy on Mirhima’s face is undeniable; she can now feel confident in her family’s future and her means to support them.

Text and photo by Micah Albert

Rebuilding a Life in War-torn Congo

On November 1, 2006, Angeline Balungwe was a recipient of the ELI Congo micro-loan in Chihonga, D.R. Congo, a remote village in the South Kivu province in Eastern Congo. Angeline a 30 year-old widow. Her husband was killed in the war in 2002, and she has been farming the local cassava root, the staple food in this region, to feed her and her five children.

Because of the war, rebel activity has taken out livestock of any kind, leaving people no manure to put back vital nutrients into the soil. The result is an extremely low yield crop, producing tubers the size of ones thumb, leaving the families like Angeline’s with very little food. Ten roots from the local cassava produces one kilo of cassava flour, and one kilo will produce two loaves of cassava bread, enough to feed three people for one day.

Formerly: Ten roots = 1 kg flour = 2 loaves of bread
Now: One root = 1 kg flour = 2 loaves of bread

ELI has introduced a new Nigerian-hybrid cassava that produces roots that are one kilo each, with up to six of these roots per plant. It starts producing these in less than nine months - less than half the time of the local version.

Only eight months after planting, Angeline has now begun to harvest her first cassava roots. After pulling up her very first plant from the ground, she could hardly believe her eyes. With the roots from one plant, she exclaimed, she could feed her family twice a day and would have enough left over at the end of the day. And with this harvest, she will have up to 10 cassava seedlings to replant the next year, sell them in the community or give them away to friends and family.

The idea is spreading through out this 100-square-kilometer region of 11 villages, and people are on their way to rebuilding a life in this war-torn part of the nation.

Text and photo by Micah Albert

News from the Congo

We received this message from Terry in the Congo:

"It has been a great day in Bukavu, Congo. We spent 7 hours visiting the ELI school. It is located in the heart of a slum. During the war in 2000, the slum was essentially in the crossfire of the conflict. People were killed and children had nowhere to run. Today, the ELI school sits like a beacon on the hillside. The community believes it was 'dropped from heaven' as one mother told us today.

"When we arrived, we were greeted by 350 singing children. They danced for us, read poems of thanks, enacted a drama written by the students to express what life was like before and after the school was created. We spent over an hour listening to the teachers, encouraging them, and
sharing together. We then visited the 6 classrooms (grade 1-6) with children ranging from 5 to 15. A typical classroom had 4 children per bench with 45-55 students per grade. They are served 1 meal each day...for many it is their only meal of the day. The feeding program was created because children would start crying after being in school for a few hours due to hunger pains. Upon completion of grade 6, the students take a national test and for the last 3 years have had a 100% passing rate. Amazing.

"At 1:30, the children leave the school and the 2nd shift comes in . . . they call them the Orientation Classes. Normally a child would continue with school but we do not have the classrooms or teachers to offer a secondary school. This limits the students' future . . . they cannot go on to a university. But the 2-year orientation program prepares them to attend a future vocational school where they learn sewing, mechanics, agriculture, etc. At the end of the program, one very sharp young boy asked what was next for him. He wanted to become a doctor . . . others wanted to be journalists, nurses, pastors, teachers. It was difficult to say that right now, we have nothing more to offer. We walked away desperately wanting to find a way to bring these kids to reality.

"On Saturday, Lindsey, Terry, and Estelle will be traveling by boat from Goma to Bukavu. They will be accompanied by an immigration officer to help minimize the bribes and expedite their journey. Micah, Kierra, Ron and Julius will be travelling to Chihonga, a remote village 2 hours away. ELI has a 'goat loan/giving' project which is transforming the region. More on this another time. Please pray for safe journeys. This land is not easy; the wars have done damage and caused suffering beyond belief."

Please pray . . .

• for continued safety for the team
• that God will use this time to bless to Congolese as well as to speak to the hearts of each person on the team
• that God will continue to show ELI how we can minister to the Congolese, to bring hope, and to establish his Kingdom in their midst