La Route Rouge

You all know that I'm trying to write a book on our adventures in the Congo. A few know how hard that has been for me. As my old friend, Ken Callahan, would explain, writing a book is like running a marathon, hard for a sprinter. Here's how such a book might begin. Anyone interested in reading what follows?

Bob

La Route Rouge, the Red Road, runs north of Lubumbashi up into the mountains of the Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Even though it is an important piece of the national highway system, the road is impossible in the dry season and impassible in the rainy season. The road that runs west and east from Lubumbashi to Kolwesi, where the huge mine transports run, is constantly repaired. The road that runs north and south has been allowed to deteriorate to its present state. The mountain passes are rocky and dangerous for the large trucks, but mostly the trucks just get stuck in the mud of the river beds. Passenger cars no longer can make the journey. For personal transportation, nothing less than a Land Rover or Land Cruiser is up to the challenge. The big trucks, carrying every kind of merchandise for the towns up country, are pounded by the road, until they break down. The road is blocked by trucks with broken axles, failed transmissions, and flat tires, trucks buried up to the frames in mud. Detours are cut into the forest to get around trucks that will wait for months for repairs or for the mud to dry enough to get going again. A person with a small business may buy product in Lubumbashi and wait 6 months for it to arrive in Mitwaba or Monono.

The road is called La Route Rouge because it was along this road that the marauding gangs of foreign armies, government soldiers, rebels, and war lords raided and burned the villages, raped, tortured, and terrorized the villagers. The road ran with the blood of the innocents. Coincidentally, the clay-sand mix of the soil makes the road actually red in color.

(La Route Rouge forms one leg of the region known as La Triangle de la Mort, the Triangle of Death.)

In the rainy season of 2010, I set out with a small team of Congolese colleagues to ride our bicycles up La Route Rouge to return to villages I had been assigned as their missionary back before the war. It was a 1,000 kilometer ride up the mountain. We were making a pastoral call on folk who hadn’t been visited by the outside church for twelve years. Despite the fact that they had endured a brutal eight-year war and were struggling and failing at recovery, the world and the church had moved on to other global emergencies.

We went just to let them know that they had not been forgotten. However, there is a major problem created by making such a visit. Whether you say the words or not, even if you deny it intentionally, a visit like this becomes a promise to return with some real help.

This book is step number one in getting them some real help. Someone needs to tell their story to the world. I’m not a good writer. I’m not even a writer, at all. But this is an important story.

I’ve been baffled by the fact that no one is telling this story. Our family joke is that, if Bishop Ntambo Nkulu had had a decent publicist, he’d have won the Nobel Peace Prize. He did receive the 2009 Peace Maker in Action Award from the Tanenbaum Center in New York City. (If the Nobel Peace Prize is an Oscar, the Tanebaum Center Peace Award is an Emmy.) I was amazed, even angered, and Bishop Ntambo was visibly upset as he asked me why no one from The United Methodist Church showed up for the ceremony. The Jews and the Episcopalians in the room were also puzzled by that. (There were a couple of us friends of the Bishop’s who are United Methodist, but we did not have standing to represent the Church.) Maybe they didn’t want to pay out the $250 for a fancy cocktail reception on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but no United Methodist bishop, representative of a general agency, or even reporter showed. And this was in New York City, the home of The United Methodist Church’s General Board of Global Ministry.

There are two questions that drove this adventure up that particular red road. First, how could a story of a war that killed somewhere between five and seven million Congolese have been so under-reported by the world’s press? Even when it was reported, you never got the sense that the world cared, like it cares about Darfur or Haiti.

The second question, and please don’t quit reading because you’re not United Methodist, or even any kind of church person. This question is important outside the Church, as I will try to explain as we go along together. The second question: How did a major Christian denomination, who is presently convinced of its decline, fail to see and celebrate an incredible story of faith, courage, and peace making? Even when it was reported, the stories came off cute, rather than powerful; interesting, rather than important. Instead of marketing plans to turn around attendance trends, The United Methodist Church could have run with this story and become the recognized greatest force for peace in the world. (It needs to be noted here that the membership of the North Katanga Episcopal Area quadrupled during the war, according to the Mission Statement of The United Methodist Church, making disciples for the transformation of the world.)