Back in 1987, when Sr. Maria Cevolani was Superior General, she asked me to go to the Congo (or Zaire, as it was then called) for a year. When I arrived in Kisangani, I found myself in the midst of a huge, damp rainforest, which, combined with the intense heat, encouraged the spread of malaria. I also found myself surrounded by great poverty: people who had to struggle to earn enough money to eat one meal a day (or even one meal every other day). They were all simple and very religious and–wonder of wonders–always smiling! I discovered that the Congolese people had music in their blood–they were always dancing! What a joy it was for me to see children only two or three years old joyfully dancing with the adults during the Sunday Eucharistic Celebrations. Inculturating myself in the Congo required a great spirit of adaptation and at first I didn’t find it easy. But now I dearly love Kisangani–a city in which I lived for three different periods in my 20-year-mission in the Congo. There, I witnessed many different kinds of suffering and great injustices toward the poor.
Today, with almost a million inhabitants, it is the country’s third-largest city. Even though our little community carries out the Pauline apostolate very simply, it is a valuable and even essential resource in the zone, which covers thousands and thousands of square kilometers. I recognized how precious and necessary our apostolate is when I saw how many teachers, catechists, and people of every age and class turned to us to satisfy their needs. Many of these people undertook 3- or 4-day bicycle trips, or 2-day walks just to reach us. Missionaries, local priests, inhabitants of remote villages–people from everywhere dropped into our Pauline Book & Media Center–an obligatory stop on their trips to the city. Books, music, religious articles: everything in the Center was precious to them and it made me more keenly aware that it was for this reason that we were there in the first place, and also why we were all very determined to stay despite the continual threat of war and the scarcity of personnel in our little community. To illustrate how important our apostolate is in this part of the country, I want to recount an incident that made a deep impression on me: I had only been in the Congo a short time and I had ordered a book for one of our customers. Even in that brief time I had learned the lesson that in Kisangani you order a book and when it gets there, it gets there–it’s useless to count the days…but several months later it finally arrived. When I told the woman that her book was in, she was overjoyed. But then she confided to me: “Now I have to make a decision. I can either buy the book or buy a pair of pants, which I really need because the pair I’m wearing now is the only one I have.”
She pondered a moment, then said with a smile, “I’m going to get the book because it’s here today and if I decide to wait, someone else might buy it and I’ve been waiting for it for such a long time!” She left the book center, package in hand, with a big smile on her face. Why do I remember this incident so vividly? Because it helped me understand more profoundly what it means to be a Pauline apostle in a frontier zone. It is we who help the people of those difficult areas nourish their minds and hearts–without us, they have no one! When I arrived in Kisangani, the Local Church was made up almost exclusively of foreign missionaries–many of them survivors of the political change-over that took place in 1964 and that produced a host of martyrs, both consecrated persons and lay people.
When I returned to the city in 2006, I saw with joy that the Local Church was flourishing. Of course there were problems, but people were moving ahead with great hope in their hearts. When Maestra Assunta Bassi was still alive, I would always visit her whenever I returned to Italy (during the final stage of her life, she was a member of our James Alberione community of Albano). On my last visit, she greeted me with the challenge: “Well, Carla, are you tired of Africa yet?” I was taken aback for a moment and then replied, “No, Maestra Assunta, not yet! I’ve lived through terrible experiences of war, ransackings, anguish and fear. The big dream of the people there is peace.”
Maestra Assunta nodded and commented: “You were asked to go to the Congo for a year but you’ve been there quite a while now.” I didn’t answer her verbally but the smiles we exchanged said it all. In harmony with Blessed James Alberione and Maestra Thecla, I felt that I had been sent to the poor, to the simple people, to politicians and intellectuals–in short, to everyone–so as to nourish their minds by offering them the bread of the truth so that each person would be able to make the right choices–the decisions necessary for living well.
Carla Dugo, fsp