A team of four from PC3 traveled to Congo in March 2009.  Their mission was, in part, to wrap up the filming of CongoCast.  In addition, they were there to assess the progress of the women’s shelter, the women’s vocational projects, and the feeding center PC3 supports.  We were happy to learn there are plans for what was originally planned as a shelter and vocational training center for the women who have suffered from the violence there, to now become a community center whereby many others will be served.  The hope is this will promote a healthier and more natural reintegration of the women back into their community.  One of the team members, Erin Bond, provided the blog below about the team’s experiences during this mission.  As you will read, not only did this team bring encouragement to the people in Congo….more so, the team members were greatly encouraged by the Congolese people.  Here’s Erin’s account………

I never wanted to go to Africa. It wasn’t personal. I didn’t have anything against Africa. I just never had a desire to go. Sure, the pyramids looked awesome. Victoria Falls would be neat to see. And lions and elephants and zebras and giraffes? All very cool. But the intrinsic problem with all of these things was that they were all located…in Africa. Which I never intended to visit.

Until July 2007, when I saw the preview episode for CongoCast, played at Roland Grise one Sunday morning. It was the summer that the middle school’s AC kept breaking down, and there we were, probably about a thousand people crammed into those hard wooden chairs that made that annoying-yet-comfortably-familiar squeaking noise with every move. The trailer started with a rainy scene, and everything else fell silent. We were riveted. I was riveted.

For the rest of the summer, I thought about Congo. I watched the podcast obsessively, playing and replaying the episodes until I could practically recite each one. I couldn’t get Congo off my mind.

Then at the beginning of 2009, I was given the opportunity to go with a team to the DRC. Suddenly, this abstract concept was becoming a reality. Suddenly, it wasn’t just thinking. It was getting vaccinations and taking malaria medicine. It was buying a sturdy pair of waterproof hiking boots (which I would later be incredibly grateful for). It was leaving my husband for nearly three weeks, the longest we’d ever been apart since getting married. It was telling my parents, I’m going to the Congo, and hoping they wouldn’t see any of the podcast before I went, especially episodes like the one in which Wendy nearly dies in a Congolese hospital.

And then, after weeks of preparation and prayer and early morning team meetings, we were off. No turning back now. Africa, here I come.

As soon we stepped into the Addis Ababa airport to await our connection to Kigali, Rwanda, I felt I had stepped into another universe. As we climbed into a Land Rover and were driven through the streets of Kigali—where the Rwandan genocide had begun nearly fifteen years earlier—I felt home slipping further and further away. And as we walked across the bridge from Rwanda to Congo, I felt as though everything secure and steady were dissolving.


Over the next two weeks, everything was going to change.

How do I summarize the experience? How do I put into words how loving the people at church were, how beautiful their faces were as they worshipped, as they sang pitch-perfect and loud songs I couldn’t translate but understood nonetheless? How can I describe how it felt to sit across from a woman as she told us how her parents had been killed and how she had been kidnapped and raped, how she didn’t know how to tell her daughter about the man who was her father, a rebel, an interahamwe soldier?

I expected the sorrowful moments, but I did not expect how much joy I’d experience in Congo. Every day, the Pastor and his wife who hosted us, brought us platters and bowls full of some of the best food I’ve ever eaten, and we never could finish it all. We devoured plates of rice and beans, cabbage and spinach and peas, grilled meat and chapatti bread. We washed it all down with Coke and Fanta and Sprite out of tall glass bottles, and we drank carafes of hot homemade lemongrass tea. The Pastor and his family treated us like royalty, and we could see in their faces how pleased they were to do it, how much it meant that people from PC3 cared about them, knew their story.

I expected the poverty, but did not expect the beauty around Bukavu. Lake Kivu is impossibly blue, with tropical flowers growing everywhere. The mountains were misty in the morning, with the sun peeking over them and making everything glow. One day, we ate ice cream made by nuns in a red-roofed convent just outside of town. We were surrounded by tall wispy-looking pine trees, by cacti and birds of paradise, and as we sat in a little pavilion sharing containers of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream, talking about how the Pastor and his wife first met decades ago, I looked around and knew I was in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

And, finally, I expected the women who had been raped to be scarred from their experiences, but I did not expect their hope. While we were there, we met a woman who had just been saved. She had been through unspeakable things, and the first time we met her, the grief was etched into her face. She seemed small and nervous and said she felt she had no purpose. By the time we left, after she had been enveloped into the church community, after she had witnessed a “graduation” ceremony celebrating other women who had similar stories and who were now independent, after she had been devouring the Bible someone at the church had given her, the change was remarkable. She sat up straighter. She smiled. She said she had a purpose now. The difference was love—God’s love and the love of the church.


As we walked back over that bridge and into Rwanda, I looked back at the Pastor standing on the Congo side of the border, waving goodbye, and I knew I would be back. As we drove to the airport, the river on our left, eucalyptus trees towering overhead, I knew this place had gotten to me, that it had gotten under my skin. A place I never wanted to visit, but I place I couldn’t possibly forget. And now that I’m back in the States, I am praying that God will send me back, that He will allow me the privilege of once again seeing that beautiful lake, of hearing the choir worshipping, of shaking the Pastor’s hand, of hugging the Pastor’s wife and saying, Asante sana. Asante.

—Submitted by Erin Bond