The third goal of the Peace Corps is about bringing home what you learned — carrying the culture and customs of a foreign land and sharing them with Americans to increase their understanding of the country where you served.

That commitment is at the heart of my memoir, which grew out of my two years teaching in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the three subsequent trips back to the people who gave me my voice and the lifelong mission of telling stories.

But not all stories are tied up in bows. The people of Kamponde believe they brought me my daughter through a fertility ceremony during my first trip back in 1996 — as she was born one year later. On my third trip back to the village in 2019, I was unable to keep my promise of taking Caitlin with me so they could bless the young woman whose life, they believe, took root in their soil. A violent uprising in the region made it too dangerous.

That emotional mother-daughter homecoming was to be the final chapter of my book.

Instead, that last chapter will tell the story of Monique Duchene, an elderly woman in England who stumbled upon me through Google searches to learn more about her birth village of Kamponde — the very one in which I served.

Monique was a little girl when she was abducted by the Belgians during the violent transition from their colonial rule to independence. She was taken to series of orphanages in Belgium, never to see her mother or country again. I wrote a story about her lifelong search for family, published by New Lines Magazine.

Monique had contacted me out of the blue and we became fast friends over email — and then in person when I visited her in the English seaside town of Eastbourne — as we worked together to tell her story and find her family. Monique had received a dossier from the Belgian Archives two years earlier and learned her birth father, a French entrepreneur who ran a store and hotel in my Peace Corps village, was also a teacher at the school where I taught. When I visited Monique in August 2022, we spent hours poring over the archives. I realized that I had often walked past the bones of the Texaco gas station her father had established, past the graveyard where he likely rests today. An uncle who may have been instrumental in sending her away was the same Catholic deacon who often gave the Sunday masses I attended to enjoy the community and hymns.

You can read about our improbable friendship in the New Lines magazine story.

Family Lost and Found

That was two years ago. There have since been updates, some wonderful and some heartbreaking — as it typical of all things Congo. The dossier from the Belgian Archives included Monique’s first ever photos of her mother, siblings and herself as a little girl. She learned her mother worked for her father and became pregnant as a teenager, giving birth to a biracial baby, which at the time was against the law. Monique learned that her father had long since died and was buried in Kamponde. But the archives did not tell her whether her siblings and mother were still alive.

We got a big break about a year ago while I was doing research on this sad chapter of Belgian Congo history: When an estimated 20,000 of multiracial children were torn from their villages and flown off to Belgium, never to see their families again. I discovered a Belgian reporter for Le Soir had written a story some 10 years earlier about the atrocities, mentioning sources working to reunite these children with their families in Congo.

I sent the reporter, Colette Braeckman, an email on the off chance she still had her notebooks and contacts from her reporting. Her immediate response led us to Monique’s last living Congolese family member within three days. Through the contacts that Colette shared, Monique found a half-brother, Amié, living in Kinshasa. The contact had years earlier talked to her brother about his search for Monique and they had kept in touch. He shared Aimé’s contacts — leading Monique to chat with him on WhatsApp.

“What a week it has been so far,” Monique wrote me several days after I had connected her with Colette. “The speed of finding Aimé after all these years has been incredible but totally overwhelming. I’ve spoken with him on WhatsApp and we will continue to chat and get to know each other. There’s little doubt that he is my half-brother, as he sent photos of our mother and also a childhood photo of me that I had never seen. It’s undoubtedly me.”

She learned that seven other half siblings through her mother’s two husbands have perished. Monique also learned that her mother had never stopped looking for her.

“As you can imagine it has been very emotional for both of us and I would like to thank you for your help in finding him,” Monique said. “He’s over the moon about finding me, has a family and several children, and is working in Kinshasa. He seems happy enough. Unfortunately, the rest of my other siblings have all passed away. Our mother had eight other children from two marriages, Aimé is from her second marriage. There’s only the two of us left now.

“Sadly, my mother passed away when she was around 48 or 49 from a stroke,” Monique told me. “Aimé says that the stress of everything that happened had been too much and that she never forgot me. Three months before she died, she requested that he kept trying to track me, which he did all these years.”

The two of them continue to chat via WhatsApp and wonder whether they might have the means and fortitude to meet one day. It would be an incredible conclusion to the memoir Monique is writing about her 70-year journey. But as with my own story of Kamponde, life does not always grant us the grace of a perfect ending.

When I thanked Colette, the reporter for Le Soir, for helping Monique find her brother and giving her an update, she thanked me as well. Journalists don’t often get to learn that their work one day could have this sort of real-world and emotional impact.

“Thank you for letting me know about the end of this long family story,” she wrote. “I’m delighted to have been able to give it a little boost. I sometimes criticize the internet, but it also works wonders!”

Born a Sin: Monique Finds a Brother was originally published in A LITTLE GOOD: My 40-Year Journey Through One Village in the Congo on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Monique Chantal Duchene recalls her final moments in the Congolese village where she was born. A white woman takes her by the hand and leads her to an old sedan where two nuns in habits are reaching out to her with a toy gendarme and some lollipops. Her unruly, dark-blonde hair is gathered in two thick braids; she is wearing a Western-style cotton dress, not one of the batik pagnes worn by the women and girls of her village. The nuns tell her she is going on a great adventure. The 7-year-old cries out for Mommy, but the nuns tell her not to worry — they will be reunited once the civil conflict ends.

Monique never saw her mother nor her birth village again. Her country was going through a violent transition from the Belgian Congo to the newly independent nation of the Republic of the Congo, which would later be renamed Zaire and is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Thousands of multiracial children like her were swept up in the frenzy, taken from their families and sent to orphanages and foster families in Belgium.

Read the Full Story at New Lines Magazine

When Christmas rolled around last week, perhaps some thought of Jesus or maybe the Pope, various elders and priests. All those men preaching from pulpits about being good Christians.

But I thought of Sisters Kapinga and Thèrése, two of the hundreds of thousands of Catholic nuns who work tirelessly behind the scenes and then sit quietly in the pews around the world.

These two sisters — each heading up the two competing Catholic orders in my former Peace Corps Village — are anything but quiet. They do more in one day than most of the village men accomplish in a week. That’s not to malign the men; most Congolese guys would readily admit they are too busy arguing over politics, drinking, and scheming about their next money-making ventures.

This Christmas, surrounded by family and friends — living my easy life with plenty of presents under my artificial tree, watching TV commercials with happy millennials gifting one another Pelotons or gas-guzzling SUVs — I wondered how the two sisters were celebrating the holiday back in the DRC.

My trip to Congo was filled with loads of tension and the suffocating PTSD among the people of Kasai Central who are coming out of three years of violent conflict, loss of family and displacement from homes. An estimated 5,000 people had been killed.

So these two sisters shared with me badly needed laughter and those traits I have always admired among the Congolese: They are playful, hopeful and oh-so resourceful.

Sister Thèrése is the usurper who came with her small flock from the order of Mother Mary of Perpetual Help to build and run a new primary school. Sister Kapinga is the headmistress of the old elementary school built back when the population was about half the 4,000 people that reside in and around the mission of Kamponde today.

When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer, there was Père Paul, the lone holdout from the colonial Belgian Congo days. The Catholic nuns of the Immaculate Heart helped with the church and ran the medical clinic helping patients with a mysterious new virus not yet known as AIDS.

This same order of nuns still lives in an old house built by the Belgian missionaries and wears traditional Congolese batik dress and headdresses. They still run the village clinic and the primary school just up the road from the secondary school where I once taught.

Headmistress Kapinga runs the school with an iron fist, keeps the dirt-floor classrooms well-swept and was proud to show me that there were now separate latrines for the boys and girls and a trough that would soon have running water to promote good hygiene.

“We’re not living in the past anymore, Madame Elizabeth,” she told me. “You see how much we have progressed?”

Indeed, though the school looked about the same as it had some 40 years ago and the classrooms were no better off — crumbling brick walls and dirt floors, no glass in the windows and pockmarked chalkboards — the pupils did look healthier than on my last visit in 2006. The cell tower and solar panels in the village square did lend an air of progress. I saw many barefoot kids in their blue-and-white school uniforms carrying around little cardboard replicas of cellphones, pointing them at me to take faux photos, nodding and smiling as if to say: I know that you know that it’s a fake, but the pretending is fun and hopeful all the same.

Sister Kapinga was delighted when I gifted her one of the brightly colored crocheted necklaces made by my American friend, 91-year-old Bobbie Dodson, an industrious church lady who lives near me and has raised more than $60,000 selling these necklaces to build schools in the DRC. She loved the story about these strangers raising money to help schools like hers.

But then Sister Thèrése found out. Her small order dresses in the more traditional white cotton habits with royal blue sashes and wimples. Thèrése learned I had toured the old primary school with Sister Kapinga and handed out hundreds of notebooks and pens donated by friends back in the States. I heard through the grapevine that she was miffed. Not to be outdone, she insisted that we come to dinner that night — and tour her newer school the next day.

These sisters live in a new, adobe-style mud house with exposed rafters and a corrugated tin roof. It’s just across the road from the old Peace Corps house where a teacher and his family now live. We sat out on the concrete porch and drank fresh palm wine until the sun went down. Sister Thèrése pushed us to down more of the fermented sap while drinking hers out of a thimble-sized glass mug as cute as the colorful foil snowflakes that hang from their rafters.

When the heavy evening rains began, we retired to the dining room and were served a wonderful dinner: soup made with vegetables from the nuns’ own gardens, chicken from their own hen house, the gooey manioc dough known as fufu or bidia and yummy cassava leaves.

I knew that this new order of sisters had been robbed at gunpoint several weeks before we arrived, having had their cellphones and cash stolen. So I gave Sister Thèrése one of the androids I had brought from the States and we sat there in the soft light of solar-powered lanterns — remember there is no electricity in Kamponde — and I showed her how use some of the new apps on the phone. The hard rain was so loud on the tin roof, it was nearly impossible to talk so we mostly chuckled over the GIFs and emojis I shared with her.

We can now chat on WhatsApp; me from my stucco townhouse outside of San Francisco and Sister Thèrése from her tin-roofed convent in the Congo.

The next morning, Sister Thèrése led me around the compound, showing me the impressive new school, the working farm, the trenches she had helped to dig, ones that shouldered PVC piping that would soon carry potable water. I asked her who was behind this new water system and whether it was the same one that would soon supply water to the other primary school.

“Oh those sisters think the water will just magically appear, but we got our hands dirty to help dig those trenches,” she said, adding, to my surprise, that a Congolese engineer was building the first potable water system in the village since the Belgian missionaries ran the mission.

Sister Thèrése had this charming little tick of poking me in the ribs as we walked along and she whispered in my ear that the convent could sure use a new generator — poke poke — and a few more cellphones for the other sisters — poke poke — and an American benefactor who could send them textbooks and aid for the orphans she also took in after the uprising.

On our last morning, the ever-entrepreneurial sister slipped me a To Whom It May Concern letter to any Catholic Church in the United States asking for help with the orphans and school. I promised her that I would inquire; I’ll head to some local Catholic Churches and try to find them a patron, the way Bobbie and her fellow Presbyterians are helping to build schools in the Kasai.

Later that morning she took me to meet the water engineer, Evariste Ilunga, who had an African Development Bank grant and was in the process of installing a system that would deliver drinking water to half dozen public fountains. The mamas would no longer have to walk a mile to the old source, carrying the heavy, sloshing buckets on their heads.

“We started to help dig the trenches for the pipes after the village men determined they would no longer work if they weren’t going to be paid,” Sister Thèrése told me as we walked toward the water tower and surveyed the trenches that ran along the main village paths.

Ilunga — looking the part of engineer with his white beard, glasses and wellies — showed me the massive water tower under construction. The water pump would bring up safe groundwater to be delivered throughout the village via seven public taps and yet another one for the parish. He hoped the project would be finished by the end of the year.

I told him he was a hero. But Ilunga countered: “Not really, because I couldn’t get them interested. I told them, `The government financed this project, I executed the project — but what is your contribution to make it happen?’”

Alas, nothing. They refused to dig the trenches unless they got paid. But his grant was only enough to build the water tower and install the massive reservoir pump that was on its way.

“They just don’t care,” he told me, shaking his head in frustration. “I have done this in many other villages for 20 years, and this is the only one where they just don’t care.”

In fact, Jim Mukenge — my friend who traveled with me to Kamponde and is a member of the provincial parliament so keeps up on projects such as this — recently told me the project is on hold because the workers were not getting paid.

Ilunga left, no doubt with his hands thrown up.

My Western mind says: Lordy, the village should band together and just get it done! Having safe drinking water flowing from village taps would be a huge boon to sanitation and sanity for all. In their minds, I suspect, they’re saying: Why should I put in all the free work for a government that has done so little for me?

The morning that we were packing up to leave Kamponde, I had Jim’s security guys sneak over our own small generator to the new sisters, knowing they could use it to charge their one cellphone and perhaps rig it up to an old, tiny TV I saw on their living-room shelf.

I delivered a modest medical kit to the Immacuate Heart sisters who run the clinic.

I know that it’s now up to them and the thousands of sisters out there to just get it done.

I hadn’t been in Kamponde more than 10 minutes when one of my students from long ago approached, welcomed me with back with a double-fisted handshake, then looked over my shoulder and asked: “Where is Caitlin?”

One by one, over those first few hours back in my Peace Corps village in the heart of Congo, people approached me and asked to meet my daughter. I was hoping they had forgotten.

I had pledged during my last visit in 2006 to bring Caitlin back with me 10 years later, once she had turned 18, so that they could bless her, like they had blessed me so many years before.

As I write in the draft of my memoir about that second trip back:

This village was where I had come into my own. It’s where I felt that first heady rush that comes from teaching a great class. It’s where I overcame aching isolation and discovered the simple pleasure of just sitting alone.

Kamponde is where I prayed for rain so I could wash my long hair; where I danced around fires, learned to play a better guitar with a boyfriend who visited from time to time; where I walked behind mothers carrying precious babies to their early graves.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo — known then as Zaire — was where I wrote for an hour every night for two years by kerosene lantern, preparing me to go on to write as a foreign correspondent from points around the globe.

I was the last volunteer in Kamponde; the Peace Corps pulled out as corruption overran the school where I taught English with the conviction that I was truly doing something good.

My job with The Associated Press allowed me to return to Kamponde in 1996, to renew my ties with the villagers and write about who we had all become over the years. They had been sad that Chris and I had yet to have a child, so they held a ceremony with prayers and songs, calling on their gods to bring us the baby we had wanted for years.

I learned I was pregnant a few short months after that. I knew it was unlikely that my thank-you letter filled with photos of the blue-eyed baby girl would arrive by Congo’s pitiful postal system. Now here I was, in 2006, to thank them in person for those prophetic prayers.

They made me promise to return again with Caitlin one day, so that she, too, could be blessed.

* * * * *

And they had not forgotten. One village patriarch I had now known for nearly four decades marched into the hard-packed red dirt courtyard outside the church rectory and scolded me: “You broke your promise, Miss Elizabeth. What do you have to say?”

What did I have to say? That it was too dangerous and too difficult.

They of all Congolese should know: The people of Kamponde had been forced to flee into the bush for three months, sneaking back to their fields every few days to harvest food, fending off malaria and malnutrition. They were hiding as a newly formed anti-government militia from the Kamwina Nsapu ethnic tribe marched hundreds of kilometers up the main dirt road through the province, burning things up, tearing people down.

When then-President Joseph Kabila sent in security forces, the fighting escalated into what U.N. officials worried would be an outright genocide. Both sides were accused of mass rape, the murder of innocents, beheadings and the recruitment of children to take up arms.

And now, the PTSD was palpable, the side-eye suspicion seemed to follow us as we slowly made our way to them. As an outsider with the benefit of a long-range, bird’s-eye view, I could actually feel that much of the joy and innocence I had once known was now gone.

Truth be told, I was relieved that Caitlin had stayed behind. Not only was the trip incredibly hard, the security was still too precarious. My friend Jim Mukenge — a member of the provincial parliament who had traveled with me in 2006 and again on this trip — insisted we take two 4x4s in case one broke down, and three sweet-natured tough guys who watched my every move.

When the regional police chief learned I would be staying in Kamponde, he dispatched an armed officer to sleep on the ground in front of my rectory room door.

Much of the sweet serendipity I had promised Caitlin now appeared suffocated by strife.

First Trip Canceled

Caitlin, Nick and I had our visas and were getting ready to go in 2016, just as Caitlin turned 18 and could make up her own mind about making such a trip. As I wrote in this September 2016 Kickstarter update, things were looking good for a Christmas trip. But then Kabila postponed elections and riots broke out in Kinshasa; I didn’t want to bring Caitlin into that environment. We postponed for the first time until the spring of 2017.

At the same time, Kasai Central — the province where Kamponde resides — was hit with the first real violence since independence from Belgium in 1962. Kasai had even managed to mostly skirt the civil war of the late 1990s — but was also largely neglected by Kinshasa. The province has always been seen by the ruling class as an opposition stronghold. Étienne Tshisekedi, the longtime opponent of the three-decade dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, hailed from the Kasai.

His son, Félix Tshisekedi, was elected president in January after his father died. Nearly a year later, however, he’s yet to visit the province.

The ugly provincial saga started in August of 2016, unbeknownst to much of the world. Security forces are believed to have killed the royal chief of the Kamwina Nsapu, Jean-Prince Mpandi, head of the people in the Dibaya region of the Kasai. He had been calling on his followers to rise up and demand more from their government: better infrastructure, education and public health.

Mpandi’s murder provoked a heady revolution taken up by neighboring chiefs espousing the cultural conviction that the collateral damage of bystander deaths was justified. The recruitment of children to fight alongside them was all for the greater good.

In the last year, since I’ve known Caitlin could not travel with us, I have wondered how I would structure the final chapters of my memoir. I decided to wait until after this trip to see what would unfold: Would some central characters be missing or killed during the uprising? Thankfully, no.

Would I finally up throw up my hands and say the trip was too hard for this old gal with the bad back, a journey that appeared fraught with bad omens and political roadblocks?

Again, no. I was determined to go this year or likely never go at all.

Matata

Once I got to Kananga in early September, I learned that many of the estimated 5,000 people who were killed between 2016 through 2018 had been slaughtered right outside of the provincial capital, their bodies buried in shallow graves. I learned that a lone priest was brave enough to go door to door, offering prayers at makeshift burials, even as the government forces continued to gun down anyone whom they believed might have been part of the KS militia.

“So many innocent people were killed; everyone knows someone who died,” Jim said, adding that both sides were to blame. The Kanwina Nsapu would put drugged-up children at the front lines — telling them the magical powder that laced their alcohol drinks would protect them from the bullets. Fake wooden guns became talismans that would carry them safely to the afterlife.

Now I understood that the “why” behind “she could not go” would become my final focus. I mean, when 5,000 people are slaughtered and some 1.4 million people have to leave their homes — and the world barely blinks — the journalist in me just knew. I began to concentrate on the reporting as much as the personal narrative behind my return to this village.

The most intriguing interview was with one of the Kamwina Nsapu chiefs, Basile Kupa, who was oddly open about why he took up arms. He showed me the powder he used to drug up the children who fought alongside him. He acknowledged some regret for the lives lost, but said the government was to blame for most of the killings in their counterattacks.

As we spoke, the python he believes gives him power slowly slithered around his neck. Basile said his name was Matata.I knew hakuna-matata means “no troubles” in Swahili — yes, like the song of “Lion King” fame — so I asked if he didn’t mean Hakuna-matata?

He laughed and said, no, just Matata, because the 6-foot snake is a real troublemaker.

I also spoke to two social workers who are helping the child soldiers get their lives back on track. A well-placed farmer who has turned his family compound outside of Kananga into an agriculture school for some of those children is helping me interview several of those young men and women who are not only traumatized, but also ostracized from their families.

Jim even got us an invite to Sunday-after-church drinks with a dozen of the chiefs of the Lulua, the largest and most powerful ethnic group in the western part of the Kasai. Among them was the relatively new chief of the Kamwina Nsapu, Jacques Kabeya Ntumba.

They all sat there drinking, laughing and carrying on, these men of rival families who had been pitted against one another during the uprising. The new KS chief (the one on the left in the flowered shirt in the video) insisted that the Peace Corps was actually just a cover for the CIA — that old trope! — and we had a good-humored debate about why that was not true.

Jim told me the best reporting on the uprising was by the French journalist Sonia Rolley.

Her on-the-ground investigative reporting during the uprising was remarkable. She put herself at great risk to tell the story: what provoked the uprising; who the players were; the consequences and aftermath of all that fruitless fighting.

If you want to learn more, I encourage you to read these two incredible pieces of reporting, though I also must warn you that they contain videos with extreme violence.

Kamwina Nsapu Violence: Chapter One (The Death of a Chief)

Kamwina Nsapu Violence: Chapter Two (The Army’s Response)

And here is an open-source Kamwina Nsapu Primer composed by Rolley.

Two Young UN Investigators Killed

So, back to why Caitlin could not go.

As Nick, Caitlin and I were now preparing for our second attempt to get to Congo with new airline tickets in hand in the spring of 2017, we learned two young UN investigators — American Michael Sharp and Swede Zaida Catalan — along with their Congolese interpreter had been killed.

The two were investigating the atrocities and had disappeared outside of Kananga on the same road that we take down to Kamponde. While it was initially reported that they drove into an ambush ordered by one of the militia chiefs, an investigation last year by Foreign Policy and other journalism outfits suggested Congolese authorities may have been involved in their murders in an attempt to prevent them from reporting on their misdeeds in the region.

I wrote about their murders in this Kickstarter update.

Second Trip Postponed

And that’s when I knew Caitlin would not accompany us on this journey.

As we were heading back from Kamponde to Kananga — now we’re in mid-September — our driver pointed to the area where Michael and Zaida’s bodies had been found, just on the southern side of the Moyo River bridge. I asked the driver to stop so that I could pay my respects.

Jim reminded me that moyo in the Tshiluba language not only means “hello,” but also “life.”

It was remarkable how many people asked me if I knew Michael and Zaida — they called them by their first names as if they knew them well. There was profound sadness that these young idealists who were trying to help them had been killed on their land.

One teacher from the area told me she prays for Michael and Zaida every day and hopes that they are resting in peace.

She comes from the same village where the uprising first began.

Why She Couldn’t Go was originally published in A LITTLE GOOD: My 40-Year Journey Through One Village in the Congo on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was among the hundreds of thousands of Northern California residents who were without power last week. I got off easy; power went out on Wednesday night and was restored by the time I got home from work on Thursday. Really no big deal. Some food had to be thrown out; but I could charge my phone in the car and had plenty of batteries and bottles of water.

Pacific Gas and Electric — whose faulty equipment was partially to blame for the deadly wildfires of the last two years — determined wind gusts were going to be strong and humidity levels low, thus creating conditions for a potential round of blazes. I don’t begrudge them for trying to save lives; they’re up against climate change and our new normal.

And having only been back from Congo for a week, much of my three weeks was spent in areas with little or no electricity or running water. Nick and I were constantly rigging up ways to charge our phones, laptop and camera batteries. Bucket baths were de rigueur. And we saw Chinese- and German-made solar panels everywhere, from smaller Etch-a-Sketch-sized panels thrown up on the thatched raffia of mud huts, to larger panels powering up beauty salons.

We purchased a small gasoline-powered, Indian-made generator in Kananga for 150 bucks to take to Kamponde so that we would always have a way to charge our phones and batteries. I ended up leaving it behind for the Catholic nuns. In one of the rare news stories out of the Kasai region of Congo, I had learned a few weeks before we left for the DRC that the nuns and parish priest had been robbed at gunpoint; cellphones and salaries for their teachers stolen. So now these hardworking sisters — who run a school, farm and take care of orphans, all without the luxury of electricity — now also had no way to communicate outside of the village.

And when our generator ran out of petrol, I sent my laptop to a little shop where I paid about $2 to get it fully charged in about three hours using a solar panel. Incredible progress for a small village where, only 13 years ago, there was no solar power or cellular tower.

“Solar power and wireless communications are made for Africa, because we don’t have the infrastructure,” says my old friend Jim Mukenge, a Kananga-based politician who helped me organize this great, exhausting adventure and traveled with me to Kamponde.

“The cheap solar panels and LED bulbs now coming from China are a blessing,” Jim told me. “In all the villages now, everybody has a little panel. They can have a little light; they can play their music. And they can they can charge phones and have a little income.

“They can feel like they’re part of the modern world.”

Counting My Blessings

We take for granted our modern devices and utilities in this country — and I’m as spoiled as the next girl. I shuddered at the thought of taking a cold shower once my power went out — only weeks after I had taken dozens of chilly bucket baths. Granted, it was steaming hot in Congo and we’re into Fall weather here. Still, with the flip of a switch, I could turn on my central heating and a cold shower would do me no harm — for crying out loud.

The United States is the second-largest consumer of electricity in the world, after China, with more than 3.9 trillion kilowatts per hour used each year. The Congo, by contrast, is the eleventh largest country in the world and yet just 9% of its 85 million people have access to electricity.

Even Kananga, the provincial capital of Kasai Central with about half a million people, only gets electricity on and off from about 11 a.m. until sundown. And estimates are that that fewer than 10% of the people in the ramshackle city still recovering from three years of violent conflict are connected to the national power company, SNEL. If you ask people in Kananga why the power hasn’t improved over the years, many will tell the 32-year dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and his successors, Kabila father and son, like to keep a grip on power by dictating when it’s lights on — and lights out.

We stayed with Jim, who comes from a revered political family in the Kasai and was recently elected to the state assembly. His father, Barthélemy Mukenge, was the first governor in Kasai after independence; he died last year at 93 years old and the city erected a statue in his honor. And yet, Jim and his wife Bernadette — both of whom went to college in the States — rent an old colonial house in Kananga with no running water and spotty electricity.

If they chose to use the national power company, it would cost them $80 to $100 a month. That, in a country where the GDP per capita was only $495 last year and most make fewer than $100 a month. Jim instead pays $50 a month to be hooked up to a neighborhood generator, where some 25 houses share the electricity and get more hours out of it than SNEL.

Jim and Bernadette are among the educated, political class. She has a great job with the massive United Nations’ operations in Kananga. They can afford a small village to help them run their household, fetching petrol for their generators, cooking over coal fires, gathering water from the local wells for their laundry, cooking and bathing.

Still, it’s just an endless day of gathering, carrying, prepping and stoking.

It’s so frustrating. The DRC is endowed with mountains of precious minerals, yet much of it is mined using child labor and little of the proceeds trickle down to the help the people. The mighty Congo River has the potential to install up to 100,000 MW of hydropower capacity, enough to help electrify much of the African continent, according to USAID.

Yet some 60 years of dictatorship and corruption since independence in 1960 has left the country, formerly known as the Belgian Congo and Zaire, completely broken. In a country the size of the United States east of the Mississippi, there are fewer than 1,000 miles of paved roads — compared with more than 4 million miles of paved roads here at home.

The mere 60 miles between the city of Kananga and my Peace Corps village, Kamponde, is not only unpaved, but ravaged by foot-deep ruts and yard-wide sand pits or yawning puddles. It took us four hours to get about two-thirds of the way there in a 4x4 — we had to give up due to monsoon rains and stay in a guest house in Tshimbulu — and six hours driving straight back at the end of the week.

Jim actually helped build a hydroelectric dam just outside of Kananga, one that began giving 24-hour electricity to the Good Shepherd Hospital in Tshikaji back in 1985. Today, the plant still powers what is now the Christian Medical Institute of Kasai (IMCK), which has 140-bed teaching hospital, a lab tech school and college-level nursing program, as well as specialized programs in dentistry, surgery, opthalmology, maternity and pediatrics.

We stopped by on our way back from Kamponde and Jim found that his old colleagues who worked with him way back when he was the operations manager were still there, working the turbines and protecting the plant during the recent Kasai uprising. It was a beauty to behold.

Still, why can’t this be emulated throughout a country blessed with vast rivers and endless ingenuity? Most will tell you: government corruption, decades of conflict— and the exhaustion that comes from always being let down.

The newly elected President Félix Tshisekedi has his work cut out for him.

The Sun Also Accelerates: Solar Power Dominates One Corner of Congo was originally published in A LITTLE GOOD: My 40-Year Journey Through One Village in the Congo on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Kanyi was a freshman and among the few girls in the high school. She was shy and respectful and would stop by the Peace Corps house for extra help with her homework, determined to graduate alongside the boys. Kamulombo was a year above her and one of the class clowns who had the most amazing smile. His joking aside, he was an excellent student, always first among those raised hands and often walked me home after school.

They were not that much younger than me. I quietly turned 22 during my first year as an English teacher at the high school. I didn’t want the rowdy senior boys to know many were my age or older, having had to drop out of school to help their family in the fields or not having the money to go to school.

Today, Kanyi is 50 and had just undergone surgery and was on medical leave from her teaching job in the primary school. Kamulombo is 59 and teaches at the high school. They will have been married for 35 years later this year and have 10 children. I learn all their children have survived — save for two lost to miscarriages — as it’s common to lose several along the way, to malaria or malnutrition.

When I returned to Kamponde in 2006, Kanyi showed me how rough her hands had become due to working in the fields to supplement their teaching incomes. Though I felt sorry for them at the time, I have come to learn that they have abundant fields, which have nourished their children and given them a relatively stable and happy life. I left them a bunch of vegetable seeds for their fields — which many of you donated — and some flowers to plant around their family compounds.

During that second return to Kamponde in 2006, Kanyi tapped on the door of the guest room in the rectory, where I was staying. She had brought me a chicken — an incredibly generous gift — but I told her a white lie, that I was a vegetarian, and told her to keep the chicken as I knew it was badly needed protein for her family.

Oh, how much we have all changed over these last four decades. Yet we all seemed to have kept our sense of humor, our fond memories of one another and our determination to make sense of and find meaning of our shared journey.

In this video, they joke with me about how old we all are — and how, um, curvy I have become with age — and how all we can really do is laugh.

I wasn’t skinny when I was in Kamponde, but by Congolese standards, I was too thin. The senior boys used to always joke with me that I should marry one of them so that they could put some meat on my bones. (I would always just roll my eyes and quickly change the subject.)

I keep reminding myself that it’s a compliment in Congo — to remark on how “healthy” one appears.

Perhaps my favorite hug of this entire journey. Impromptu and heartfelt.

A Life of Reconnecting was originally published in A LITTLE GOOD: My 40-Year Journey Through One Village in the Congo on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We did it. We made it to Kamponde — and it only took three years!

Big, fat, sweaty hugs to all of you who helped to make it happen. And so much gratitude to Nick Davila (who shot the video and photos) Jim Mukenge and his gang (JC, Tonton and Chico), and the drivers and crew for making this this incredible journey possible. There is no way I could have done it without them — nor would I have wanted to.

I’ve been home now for six days and was hit hard with a bacterial gut infection that has taken two antibiotics to get me back on my feet. I wanted to check in and let you know that I haven’t forgotten you — your postcards, trinkets and Kuba cloth await! — and I will begin to blog in detail this weekend about various aspects of the trip.

But I do want to share with you a few photos and videos to give you an idea of what our first day on the road between Kananga and Kamponde was like. In this one, the drivers map out the route in the dirt while the dumb white lady fiddles with her phone.

We had our lead 4x4 with Jim Mukenge and his crew, then a truck that followed with all our gear — spare tires, extra petrol, rice and beans, a generator, school supplies, water and luggage, etc. — and then two Congolese pastors in their own jeep who wanted to show me a new school that was under construction.

Here are some kids who greeted us in Dibatayi, a village about a third of the way to Kamponde. I went there with the Presbyterian pastors who are working with Build Congo Schools, an American organization that raises money to build schools and support educational programs in Congo. I had promised to stop by and see one of the new schools being built. The kids figured I was some Very Important Presbyterian Person (I am not) and had prepared this sweet song, which was then followed by speeches and gifts of two terrified pigeons, a piece of boa skin and a bottle of local honey.

The Old School, where kids sit on the ground:

In the new school, the kids will have benches, desks and roof that will not force them to flee when it rains. They will no longer have to go to the forest to gather wood and raffia to patch up the school, often injuring themselves with machetes.

And then, back on the road.

Later that day, we had to get out and let the driver get the 4x4 through some sandy area without our weight. I look calm and composed, but it was about 95 degrees and 90% humidity and I was dripping in sweat & had to pee like mad (but wasn’t about to make the guys wait around while I ran into the bush.)

More to come …

The Road to Kamponde was originally published in A LITTLE GOOD: My 40-Year Journey Through One Village in the Congo on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Day Four in Kinshasa. We have confirmation of our Congo Airways flight to Kananga on Friday. That is the city about 60 miles north of Kamponde where we will stage for a few days before heading south in a 4x4.

We’ve been staying at the same hotel where I worked as a journalist two decades ago, as I wanted a sense of continuity and a fill of memories. Yesterday, walking through the lobby I stopped short when I saw the same pharmacy where I had looked for something to sooth my stomach some 22 years ago. It was that day in March 1997 I realized I likely was pregnant, just as thousands of people were fleeing Kinshasa across the Congo River to Brazzaville as the airport had shut down. The civil war was in full swing and the anti-government rebels who had marched west across the country were now 700 miles from the capital.

Here is a scene from the draft of my memoir about the pharmacist who told me that day that it was time to go home. It takes place in March 1997.

From Chapter Five, Morning Sickness:

I was lying in our hotel bed that night, thinking about the grueling day. The U.N. cargo plane, filing my story by satellite phone while sitting crossed-legged on the tarmac at the airport in Kisangani. And then the long, silent flight back to Kinshasa. We were all shell-shocked over what we had witnessed that day: tens of thousands of starving, sick and barefoot Hutu refugees who had been walking for months to escape Tutsi retribution.

They had been swept up in their neighbor’s civil war, one that would go on to become the deadliest since World War II, with more than 5.4 million people killed from combat and its lingering consequences. Rebels who had captured much of eastern and central Congo in the last year were now advancing toward the capital and for the first time truly threatening Mobutu’s grip on power. Hundreds of journalists had descended on the capital to cover the likely downfall of the 32-year dictator. Chris and I had been in the capital for two weeks. It had become one of the world’s biggest stories; I was filing three or four times a day with other AP correspondents who had flown in to help.

It had been one of those awful days where you had to press on and do your job: ask people personal and painful questions, write down their replies, point your cameras at them, and then walk away. Another one of those awful days where you hated the world but loved your job — a photo I took in the Hutu refugee camp that morning would run in The New York Times the next day — telling yourself that giving those refugees a voice was at least a minor contribution. An awful day where you are so anxious about getting your satellite phone to finally connect that you can physically feel your blood pressure rise. An awful day because, in your heart of hearts, you know your story likely won’t do a damn thing to help those hungry people back on the ground, under their tarps and alone in the world.

Just before I fell asleep that night — Chris gently snoring beside me — I remembered how sick I had felt that morning on the plane. I had forgotten because I had rallied just fine and adrenaline kept me working into the night. I rarely kept track of my periods anymore, having by this time figured I wasn’t going to get pregnant after three long years of trying. Sure, I had stopped having my usual glass of red wine at dinner, when all the reporters, photographers, producers and cameramen gathered in the hotel restaurant to share steaks and what they had witnessed that day. I took my folic acid.

But other than a woozy head and nausea, I felt no other signs of pregnancy.

I tiptoed into the bathroom with the reporter’s notebook in which I kept all my travel dates and source contacts, sat on the bathmat in my cotton nightgown and pulled my knees to my chest. I started flipping through to see the last time Chris and I were in the same country, and the same bed, before this assignment.

I froze. It was Monrovia. That wretched day covering the aftermath of the street fighting among the gangs of the warlords. Chris had remained back in Liberia; I had returned to our little yellow house in Abidjan and shortly thereafter was admitted to the hospital with the malaria endemic to the region.

Christ Almighty, I thought to myself, putting my head between my knees. If I were pregnant, the fetus would have been exposed to malaria and the mind-altering drugs that had been pumped into me at the hospital. I sat like that on the bathmat, arms wrapped around my knees, for what felt like hours.

I’m undeserving, I thought to myself, too caught up in bylines and benchmarks to be worthy of this gift — even if I had wanted it so badly.

Finally, I went back to bed, determined not to panic and not to tell Chris. I knew he would make us leave right away. And I wasn’t about miss the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, the man whose portrait still hung in every classroom back in Kamponde — the village where just months earlier they had prayed and danced for me, asking their gods to bring me a child.

I ducked into the hotel pharmacy the next morning. The pharmacist took one look at me and held up a box of prenatal vitamins, heavy on the folic acid. She also held up a pregnancy test, but I shook my head no. We were staying at the best hotel in Kinshasa — the perimeter ringed by armed soldiers to protect all the foreign journalists — and I felt sure the tablets were safe. But I didn’t want to know if I was truly pregnant. I’d have to tell Chris. We’d have to leave.

I thanked her and turned to go.

“Madame,” the pharmacist said softly, “don’t you think it’s time to go home?”

I turned back to her, my hand still on the door, smiled and nodded, “Oui, merci, bientôt.”

Yes, thank you, soon.

I have never forgotten the striking amber eyes of that petite pharmacist in her starched white smock, imploring me to put aside any professional foolishness and take care of myself and my baby.

I have often wished I could go back and thank her for being brave enough to tell a stranger it was time to go home.

When I stepped into that pharmacy yesterday and spoke to the pharmacist, I told her my story and asked her if she knew of a young woman who had worked there two decades earlier. She listened politely, shook her head, and then said, “Can I help you with something?”

No thank you, I said, and turned back to the lobby. Congolese businessmen sat drinking their imported beers, oblivious of the lone woman among them whose eyes were damp, heads down as they pecked away at their smartphones.

Chapter Excerpt: Morning Sickness was originally published in A LITTLE GOOD: My 40-Year Journey Through One Village in the Congo on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today I went shopping for some “superwax.” It comes in every imaginable size and saint, adorned with animals and fish, flowers and fauna, the latest presidents and popes, and many Jesus Christs with and without his crown of thorns. The cloth with Mobutu in his trademark leopardskin toque was once ubiquitous here, but no more. I looked for some Obama — he is such a beloved figure here — but no such luck. I have made it my mission to find some!

One of the traditions here is gifting pieces of superwax cloth to the special women in your life. For me, that will be Tshinyama’s wife (he was the Peace Corps cook for some 20 years), the chief’s wife and the Catholic nuns who run the small clinic in the village — if they are still there. (Again, I don’t know what to expect when I get to Kamponde since so many people were forced to flee during the uprising of 2016 and 2017.)

Superwax was originated by the Dutch and became a favorite across the continent, particularly in West Africa. The batik-like waxing process holds the colors true and long. Be sure to turn up the volume for this one — shopping amid some beautiful, soothing Congolese music.

Hurry Up and Happily Wait was originally published in A LITTLE GOOD: My 40-Year Journey Through One Village in the Congo on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.