(Former Madison resident Belinda Bauman, whose husband Stephan is the president of World Relief, writes of her trip to Congolese refugee camps. Her report was picked up by The Daily Beast.)
My journey into the heart of war-torn Eastern Congo began last summer at the suggestion of a trusted friend. To my husband’s credit, he whole-heartedly supported the idea of his wife traveling into a war zone. This, after all, is the man who delivered my Mother’s Day breakfast-in-bed with reading material titled “Congo: The worst place in the world to be a mother”. And I love him for that; he knows I don’t want to be the one that cringes at hard things, but faces them squarely armed with hope. It was my husband that introduced our family to the great British abolitionist William Wilberforce, who famously said “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.”