Goma, How Deserted Lies the City

Three days ago, sometime on the 30 April, rebel troops under the command of former Congolese army general Bosco “Terminator” Ntaganda, marched upon the villages surrounding Goma, a large city in north-eastern Congo. The Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which Goma is the largest city, has played host to a dozen or more wars in only the last couple of decades and boasts history’s largest refugee camps, some numbering more than 1.5 million people. At the hands of warlords and forces descending upon Congo’s communities like starved locusts, the people of Kivu and its surrounding villages have become some of the poorest in the world. A billion people worldwide live on less than $1 a day; in Goma countless families live on less than $1 a week. In such an environment in which healthcare is so essential, it is missing; sanitation is simply not a facet of life. Every man, woman and child in Goma knows too familiarly the sound that heralds their exodus: marching on the mountains, gunfire in the hills, screaming in the homes. They know what it means to decide between fleeing into the bush with children slung over their back, where they will have no food, water, shelter or security, or staying where they are and waiting for the soldiers to arrive, young men with Kalashnikovs in hand, whose only wage is as much food as they can pillage, as many women as they can get their hands on. The troops always invade the villages first. This is life in Goma.

And so, when we hear that the soldiers are marching again, again, what are we to do? From the beautiful farmhouse in which I find myself in Zambia, gathered together with all my Hands at Work family for a time of celebration and thanking God and discovering His vision for what is next, what am I to do? It is difficult even to pray. But then, such are the occasions when prayer is most important. When it seems so trite as to be even a joke. This thing we do before we throw the first forkful of dinner into our mouths, and do more earnestly with clenched fists before an exam or interview, this thing we fall asleep doing as we lay our heads down at night, are we really to do that now? 1,000 kilometres away in Zambia, or 3,000 kilometres away in Europe, or 6,000 kilometres away in North America, what more can we do?

How deserted lies the city, once so full of people. Her children have gone into exile, captive before the foe. Our pursuers were swifter than eagles in the sky; they chased us over the mountains and lay in wait for us in the desert. Those who pursue us are at our heels; we are weary and find no rest.

- Lamentations -

Sometimes a broken heart isn’t enough. Walking amidst the smouldering ruins of the once great city he called home, the poet of Lamentations “pours out” his heart upon the ground. Broken, beat, smashed into little more than a puddle on the floor. A prayer like the one above rises from the devastation of a heart as spent as his. He can do no other. My heart is utterly sold out for the Congo. That’s no secret. When I heard about Goma, standing in our Zambian farmhouse as my friend recounts the news he has just received from one of our guys in Congo, I can only describe what I felt as something akin to getting a phone call telling you that your home has been hit by a bomb. And what could I do? Only pray, and pray more. I slept outside that night, because sometimes words aren’t as articulate a prayer as the actions that follow them, and it seemed wrong to crawl under my mosquito net into bed as I finish praying for the safety of thousands sleeping in the bush. I even had the audacity to be a little frightened of some of the sounds filling the night, birds and other unrecognisable animal calls. I was scared because I didn’t know which animals were making the noise. Gunfire is much more distinguishable a sound. And so this is me doing the little more that I can do: asking you to pray also. Even if you're not the kind of person to pray much or at all. Some things are more important than the theological standpoint in which you find yourself in this very moment. Please pray. We can do little more. And as you pray know that God has designs and dreams and visions and promises for Goma, that long forgotten city in some abstract corner of the African jungle. If you don’t know that, then your prayers will go little further than asking God how in His name or in the name of fate or destiny or bad luck or anything else something like this could happen in a world that for all intents and purposes would actually be pretty much perfect were it not for that great slip-up of His in making a creature with the capacity to ruin the place in ways so horrifying as to be unimaginable. Praying like that won’t get you or the children lost in the hills of Goma anywhere. That’s how my prayers seem to always start these days. But that mustn’t be where they end. Wading in an ocean of hearts unreservedly poured out for these children, these women, many of them pregnant, these grandfathers and grandmothers too tired to run again, let us take our lead from the poet, his heart wasted before him on the ground:

I remember my affliction and my wandering

the bitterness and the fall,

I well remember them,

and my soul is downcast within me.

Yet this I call to mind

and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed

for his compassions never fail.

- Lamentations -