A teenage perspective on going on a SOMA mission
This was originally submitted for a school project by a teenager who joined our SOMA team with her Dad.
Last June I got to visit the distant country of DRC Congo, but only for about 10 minutes. We were in Uganda on the end of a visit when we crossed the border. In Uganda I had helped children with disabilities, seen elephants and rhinos, visited friends and enjoyed lots of sunshine. But a Bishop called Sabiti had asked that we didn’t forget him and his people. The DRC is a country full of natural resources like the cobalt we use in mobile phones, but this has led all sorts of nations and multinational companies wanting to control and occupy them, and to centuries of war and conflict. So we travelled to the borderlands next to the DRC and saw what it was like to live when you have been forced outside your own country because of violent raiders intent on murder.
The beginning of the visit was spent with Emily, an English woman who used to live with us, and her new husband Alfred, a Ugandan. They have set up charities for street children and help with disabled 0-16 year olds called ‘chilli children’. They’re called that because the project helps them grow Chillies for cash. We sat in their nice centre and played with children for hours. It was inspiring to see and I particularly liked Divine a delightful three year old who gave me a huge hug and wouldn’t let go.
But this made the contrast with the refugee children from the DRC even more extreme. Last year Uganda took in 129,000 refugees, many from the DRC. This was more than double what the UK took in, at 50,042 - and that number was larger than normal due to the influx of Ukrainians refugees. The DRC conflict has been going so long it is sometimes called a forgotten conflict. The children we saw were the survivors who had been chased out of their land three times in the past seven years, by armed militias massacring women and children with machetes.
This why Bishop Sabiti wanted us to visit, and for 10 minutes we were able to cross over into his native land with an armed Uganda guard escorting us. We’d spent two days talking to his leaders and children on the Ugandan side, but just before the bridge closed for the night we crossed into DRC while hundreds of children filed back the other way unaccompanied by adults. We learnt that these 4,5,6,7 and 8 years olds were sent back each day despite the danger to maintain their farms in the daylight alongside their older brothers and sisters. At night they came back to Uganda to escape the perils of the night.
When I think about sitting on the floor with the chilli children in Uganda who have learned to farm in safety, and the peril of the DRC children crossing the bridge, who have to avoid raiders sometimes financed by the people who make our tech gadgets here in the West, and then think about all we have here in our schools it made me see the incredible benefit of living at peace. In the past two years we’ve all learned about the war in Ukraine and seen the incredible impact of many nations working together to support the Ukrainians. I wonder how much of a difference it would make if we all heard Bishop Sabiti’s cry, ‘do not forget us’ and the children and nations of the world campaigned to help those kids I met crossing the bridge that day?
