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Katho Bungishabaku - Eastern Congo
"We have all been bystanders to genocide" writes Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. "The question is why."
This is a question Katho Bungishabaku asks daily. Each morning as Katho looks out of his house he realizes that this may be the day his ministry of reconciliation is over. Katho loves the Lord with all his heart and soaks himself in the peacekeeping justice that Jeremiah calls for. Jeremiah is Katho's carillon, his mentor and his hero. He comes from a small tribe right between the Lendu and Hemma of Eastern Congo, called the Bira who are despised by the larger tribes. Tribal war and genocide have racked the eastern side of Congo and torn the church as well as the country into pieces.
He remembers that one Christian he knew well would not give him the address to NEGST because he felt it was no business of a Bira to go to NEGST. One elder said, "You would have to cut off my hand before I would give you a recommendation to go to NEGST." All this simply because Katho was from the wrong tribe. Katho painfully says, "Ethnic ties are stronger than Christian ties. Where did we go wrong? I don't know of one pastor who did not send at least one of his sons to be part of the rebel faction."
In 2001, Katho went to work on his PhD at the University of Natal in South Africa. Sometimes he would return home to find as many as 120 refugees in his home and on the compound around it. Fear and hunger gripped the people who had come seeking prayer and safety.
Later that year over 1000 people were slaughtered at the nearby hospital in Nyankunde and the hospital was devastated. "I had a brother and sister killed in that massacre. To this day I know men who were part of the rebels who did the killing. Men who profess to be Christians."
So how does Katho bring his trust in God and his call to ministry into this difficult setting? Now Katho serves as Principal of Bunia Theological Seminary where he believes the future of peace in the Congo is in training:
"For us at BTS, the new academic year is full of promises because we have learned to trust in the One who controls events and times. Our new academic year began months late because of the war. This is a very busy time for us. Never before have I observed such dedication and vigor in our lecturers. They have probably understood that if the time for reconstruction has come, it must start at BTS. Indeed, the year 2004 seems to be a year of hard work and sacrifice."
"In Bunia town, gunshots have almost ceased and a good number of people have timidly started going back to their houses and villages. Those who fled far away are also returning. They have to cover hundreds of kilometers on foot before they reach Bunia or their villages around Bunia. Among them, we have old people, sick people, children and pregnant women. It is difficult to tell whether they feel the joy of returning to their villages that have completely been burnt down or to imagine that this home coming will remind them of all the atrocities they have gone through, especially how their relatives, friends, and neighbors were brutally massacred. There is probably a mixture of these two feelings, a kind of melancholia."
"These people desperately need help, a necessary spiritual reorientation, and maybe an absolute mental re-conversion after all these atrocities and nightmares. This is true for the victims as well as for those who committed these atrocities. Again, we strongly believe that the church should be the most important agent of this reorientation and re-conversion. It is at this point that one feels the most urgent need for an adequate and contextual training of God's servants."
"It is our desire and one of our goals at Bunia Theological Seminary, to train a new generation of God's servants, dedicated to promote a Christianity of life, a generation that will put an end to a spirituality of selfish interest, of division, of duplicity and the spectacle that has finally destroyed us."
"Thus, despite our busy schedule these days, the members of our "Theological Research Group" continue to work very hard on our main research theme for the year: "The Church in Congo facing the challenges of ethnic war." However, there are factors that are beyond our control and which can be a serious handicap to our effort. Most local Churches and Denominations that sent students to BTS are not able to provide for the needs of these students because of the hardship these churches are undergoing after seven years of wars. We also need to rebuild and plant the students' fields, which were destroyed and looted during the war. We are happy to see each family making a small garden on the campus for vegetables."
This is the challenge Katho lives with – how does the church face the challenges of ethnic war. He describes congregations of believers so gripped by fear and panic that they used old witchcraft methods and walked to and from church biting sacred leaves between their teeth to ward off the evil spirits around. Many had seen, and some participated in the genocide that ripped through families, churches and villages.
The haunting question for Katho: How could the Christian church participate in this? Where did our theology and our Christian ethic go wrong? He is a man in the trenches, looking for new ways to rebuild the church to be more like Christ.
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