I am in Kayole, a neighborhood in Nairobi to help build a peacebuilding program for the Congolese, Rwandan, and Burundian refugees.  The Congolese are the largest client community of JRS in this area.

This photograph is my list of all the villages and areas that the Congolese refugees have come from.  Currently, I am in the process of making a map of where these villages are in relation to each other. We want to know this information to find out how conflicts might have been resolved in the past.

For example, if JRS has two Congolese clients in a conflict here in Kenya, and one is from Fizi and the other from Uvira, and if these two villages happen to be near each other, our first question for them would be, "In DRC, if your villages had a conflict, how would it be resolved?" Our hope is that this map would allow JRS to create a peace building program that remains culturally sensitive.  Before we open clients to new structures, the goal is to make them feel on familiar ground before taking them to something different.

Yet things are so complicated for DRC and the refugees. From conversations so far I have learned that DRC has over 420 tribes, a conflict involving resources, ethnicity, politics, and generational war. I talked with three young men today (around 23 years of age) who explained how the problem from DRC has shown itself in Kayole. "We have very little physical conflict," they said through translation, "we are guests in Kenya and we cannot fight each other, we are all in the same situation.  What we have here is psychological conflict.  We walk down the street and, it has happened, we see someone who has killed our mother, our brother, a member of our family, and, ahhhhh (holds his head), it drives a person crazy."

In conflict studies the word "intractable" is well-known.  A multi-layered conundrum that has many openings by which fuel is being added.  Plugging one does not stop the fire. Yet Paul, the JRS social worker I am working with, wrote the other day that he feels the conflicts in Kayole are centered around a lack of acceptance and forgiveness.  Accepting what has happened and forgiving the other.  I agree with him, on a fundamental level I think he is absolutely right. But this is not something that happens immediately. I remember young boys at the jail who had lost friends and were consumed with the idea of payback.  Acceptance and forgiveness was exactly what they needed but exactly what they had no strength to lay hold of.

This is a situation where God has to intervene.  We will design a peacebuilding program for Kayole, but may God be present because regardless of nationality, ability, and knowledge, the DRC situation laughs at those who approach with the hubris to think they have the final answer.

"You hear, O Lord, the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry, defending the fatherless and the oppressed, in order that man, who is of the earth, may terrify no more." Psalm 10:17-18