GOMA, Congo (RNS) — As gunfire and explosions echo across eastern Congo’s hills amid the ongoing violent conflict, another sound moves more quietly through the neighborhoods of Goma and surrounding displacement camps: the knock of faith leaders moving from door to door.
Goma, the eastern Congolese city near the Rwandan border, has long stood at the center of the region’s recurring conflict and displacement crises. Once again, the city has become a refuge for families fleeing fresh violence in North and South Kivu.
Each morning, pastors, priests, Catholic sisters and imams travel through conflict-hit streets, displacement camps and broken communities with Bibles, rosaries and words of peace. They pray with families who have lost loved ones, counsel young men tempted by revenge and try to preserve fragile ties between communities strained by war.
“The battlefield is outside,” Francis Mbombo, an evangelical preacher, told RNS, “but the next war can begin inside a home.”
The renewed violence in North and South Kivu, driven by advances by the M23 rebel group, drone strikes and retaliatory shelling, has deepened what humanitarian agencies describe as one of the world’s gravest displacement crises. More than 7 million people are internally displaced across the country of nearly 113 million.
For religious leaders on the ground, the struggle is no longer only over territory or political control. Increasingly, they said, it is also about preventing war from taking root inside families scarred by years of violence.
People who were displaced by the fighting between M23 …