Sabbath 8/9/37/120

Dear Friends

I thought we might have a bit of news from Africa that holds out some optimism despite the horrors of the last 24 years.

Bizimana gave us a report concerning his visits to Congo DR and he is going also to Rwanda and Burundi.

You will note that there have been over 5 million killed in the wars there since 1990.

Hello,Wade

I have visited CCG Goma and numbers of projects of CCG members in Goma and Masisi.

Also I have taken them three computers for Goma Internet cafe as Jean Paul had sent me funds to purchase them.

They have the Internet Cafe Project which includes a computer training center.

Also I have visited a Maize project of 17 Acres and the Irish Potatoes Project of 1 Acres and the Project of 70 goats. In Masisi, and also there in the Congo, like Masisi, to get to the project areas we had to walk 24 km.

Also in DR Congo Communication is very very poor, no roads to access areas of CCG Operations. People have to walk. Also we did not [have accommodation. We were] just sleeping in tents.

Also I have visited the stones area but I noted that to deal with the stones business we will need to register a company so we can be safe.

Mudimba Muhindo came to Goma to meet me. He came by flight because the road from Beni to Goma is not safe.  The rebels are still killing people there. About five million people are estimated to have died in the DRC's back-to-back wars since the late 1990s.

Suspected Ugandan rebels killed as many as 100 people in a spate of attacks in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo in recent days, DRC officials said on Monday. That is a sign of how armed groups continue to pose a security threat to the country.

From Thursday through Saturday, machete, and gun-wielding attackers, some dressed in DRC army uniforms, targeted several villages near the gold-trading town of Beni, about 150 miles north of the regional capital, Goma, said Feller Lutahichirwa, the North Kivu deputy provincial governor. The attackers slit the throats of most of the victims, including women and children, so aid and military officials said.

DRC officials and aid agencies blamed this and other recent attacks on the Allied Democratic Forces, a secretive rebel group founded by a Ugandan radical Islamist sect in the 1990s.

The ADF has sought to use the DRC as a springboard to topple the Ugandan government. The group waged a bloody insurgency in Uganda until around 2000, when it fled a Ugandan army offensive and established bases in the largely ungoverned eastern DRC.

The ADF is a coalition of Islamist sects and local opposition forces opposed to the Ugandan government. Originally based in Western Uganda, ADF now operates in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and is considered a terrorist organisation. Video: 2013 Ugandan government alongside other humanitarian relief agencies moves to relocate Congolese refugees to a permanent camp, as a result of the ADF, The ADF is a small militant group based and operating in the border area between eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and south-western Uganda. It was founded in Uganda in 1989 by its leader, Sheikh Jamil Mukulu, a radical Islamist who aimed to overthrow the government of President Yoweri Museveni and replace it with a loosely defined Islamist administration.

Mudimba said most of CCG people left Beni some are in local camp others are in camps in Uganda and Rwanda so no CCG people killed because they were advised to leave danger zones and fled to safe places.

I noted that most of travel in DR Congo requires flights which are very expensive that is why inductions have been delayed as in Eastern DR Congo they are rebuilding the development as all was destroyed by the war so arrangements of groups who are not yet inducted is in progress as soon as possible.

Also we plan to plant Maize factory in Goma because the people of Goma are supplied maize flour from Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya. No factory is there. I noted to have a factory installed will cost $7500 USD. Their harvested maize corns are sold outside of DR Congo to be milled and to be sold to them again.

Yours faithfully Bizimana Bosco
(National Coordinator Uganda and Senior Project Officer East and Central Africa)

We can see how life has been hard for them but many of the CCG refugees are in camps in Uganda and in the DRC.  Burundi is a little safer for them.  They try hard and they are looking after one another.  The Internet cafes of CCG are also used as an educational forum for the schools as our way of assisting the education of the children. We usually provide that free but adults pay.

Please pray for them and for the development that they are undertaking.

Wade Cox
Coordinator General