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Editor’s Note: The following is the second installment in a series on Margaret Blair Young’s work in the DR-Congo along with her husband and her brother. It explores some of the hard realities they’ve encountered and how they are being addressed not only by the LDS Church but by some remarkable Catholics as well.
To read the previous installment, click here.
Part 2: The Long Walk Through Lodja
Someone met me at the Lodja airport, Democratic Republic of Congo, but I don’t remember who it was. I was taken to my new residence, a place usually inhabited by American Evangelical missionaries. They were on vacation. My transportation was in a white van; the only other vehicles I saw on the unpaved roads were motorcycles and bicycles. All the books on the shelves were in English, and a generator powered up the lights every night at 6:00 p.m.
After I had settled in, I was taken (again in the van) to another house for lunch. There, I was introduced to the queenly Margaret—a woman with my own name who was just one year older than I. I still had not met the man whose name was the only Lodja one I knew—Abbe Veron. Months ago, I had said a few uncertain words to him over the phone when an assistant to President Scott Wyatt (Southern Utah University) handed me the phone and instructed me to greet the priest. I heard a very deep voice say, “Margaret–ca va?” After a panicked second in which I tried to remember how to answer, I managed, “Bien!” The priest with the deep voice said something else which I could not understand, and I returned the phone to President Wyatt’s assistant. (Scott Wyatt had asked me to visit Lodja the next time I went to the Congo.) Given that low, gravelly voice, I pictured the priest as a very old man—a Congolese Dumbledore.
Now I was with the other Margaret, seated on the porch. Before me was a field of patchy grass, where a few goats grazed and wild chickens pecked at the possibilities. The other Margaret’s French was lovely, beautifully articulated. She kept it simple for me, and I was able to make some good, though halting, conversation. Nonetheless, I felt that Margaret and I were sisters.
Shortly thereafter, a handsome Congolese man, close to my age, arrived on a motorcycle.
My new sister said, “That’s is the rector.” I greeted the rector with the traditional three kisses (right cheek, left cheek, right cheek again) and in my best French—which was pretty bad French. He responded with one of the most beautiful smiles I have ever seen, and then sat in a porch chair, stretched out his legs, and relaxed. I listened as the rector and the other Margaret talked—sometimes in French and sometimes in the dialect, Tetela. I understood nothing, though at one point, I heard the sister say, “Abbe Veron”. I asked her where Abbe Veron was. She answered, “Don’t you know? This is Abbe Veron. He is the rector.”
I looked at him—this strong man whom I had pictured as old and wizened—and he gave me a smaller, amused version of that great smile.
“You’re Abbe Veron?” (This was in French, of course.)
He shrugged. “C’est moi.” (“It’s me,”)
“Abbe Veron!” I repeated, and then re-did my three-kiss greeting—but this time with some certainty and more enthusiasm.
How did we become friends so quickly, we two people who didn’t even speak the same language?
It started with a walk. He offered to show me Lodja. I don’t think he planned on it being a two-hour walk, but that’s what it became. I was at level five (full force) concentration, fighting to understand just one or two words and then to guess the rest of what he was saying. Being a linguist’s daughter and trained to guess context from just a few words, I did okay. I understood enough to be completely overwhelmed by what he showed me and what he explained.
Nobody had told me about Lodja’s history. Nobody had mentioned that sixteen years earlier, it had been in the midst of a war, invaded by troops from various countries who used its airport as their base to facilitate various quests for diamonds. They had stayed in Lodja for four years, pillaging, raping, disrupting every hint of order. Even the house where I had just met the rector, l’abbe Veron, had been commandeered.
Rogue militia had looted everything, everywhere in Lodja. The schools had all been deserted. Entire electrical installations were dismantled and generators stolen. The invaders broke windows and absconded with washbasins, baths, furniture. They even invaded the cemetery, overturned grave markers and pillaged graves. The dignity of the people was undone. Death was everywhere, and orphans roamed the streets. Cast into poverty, many teenage girls resorted to prostitution. AIDS became an epidemic.
During the siege, child-soldiers were common. The various armies gave powerful weapons to boys as young as ten, who could then kill, intimidate, or threaten anyone. “A ten year old boy,” said l’abbe, “could command an old man in his nineties to kneel, to lie down on the ground, and the old man would obey, trembling.” With every gun raised, the communal cloth of respect was unraveled. With every bullet fired, traditional values were shot. After four years of this war, the people, submerged in trauma, had been robbed of their dignity and of their hope. The damage, said l’abbe, “was material, ethical, spiritual and social.”[i]
We walked on unpaved roads, and Abbe Veron introduced me to everyone we met. He knew them all, and they knew him. We would come to a home where several women would leap from their work to greet the priest. He would introduce me, and I would say the Tetala word “Moy-oh.” Hello.”.
Sometimes, after leaving a house, Abbe Veron would tell me that the person we had just talked to was an orphan—her parents killed in the war, or dead because of AIDS. (I would later learn that he took in hundreds of orphans and provided for their education. I don’t know how many, but I was told—by others, and particularly by the orphans themselves—that the number was beyond what I might imagine.)
“We’re in a moral vacuum,” he said as we walked.
I had no words for a response. It wasn’t just that I spoke so little French, but that the things he had told me went beyond anything I had imagined. How can we respond to atrocity? Any response at all feels like a cliché. Words, pretending to hold meaning, mock the meaningless reality of inhumanity. The response we innately have to desolation is simply silence, a sigh, a moan. No words.
“You’re a priest,” I managed eventually. “I know that confession is a personal thing, and that you take it seriously. If someone who had done such horrifying things were to confess them to you, what would you say?”
Now he was silent.
“Confession,” he answered after a moment, “is about mercy. Some who confess have been holding onto secrets for years. Those secrets have been eating away at them. My job is to tell them about God’s mercy, to comfort them, to help them move beyond their secrets.”
It was all about claiming the future. Everything I was seeing, everything I was learning was about claiming the future—which would somehow include me, because I was with the priest in that moment. Because I was with him and heard his story, I was called to accept some responsibility for the future. Every face, every story calls us. We choose whether to reject the call or to embrace it.
I embraced it.
That night, Abbe Veron, the other Margaret, and I ate in the waning day. I told the Abbe that I wanted to hear a Tetela song. (Music was one of my dad’s methods for learning and teaching languages.) He nodded and then blessed the food, crossing himself and saying, “Au nom du pere, du fils, et du saint esprit.” And then he sang. It was a moment I knew I would remember forever, a moment of communion in the moonlight—between and beyond our worlds. It was a Catholic song, I later learned, a child’s song. I could almost feel my father, who had died less than two years earlier, with me there; my dad who loved people from all cultures and spent his life learning their languages, their songs, their stories.
Dad worked with people of all religions, and when he found a prejudice in his heart, his solution was to learn the language of the person he was judging. He was my example. I was doing a very “Dad” thing at that moment, and I could imagine him nodding approval, saying, “Margaret, aren’t you lucky! You get to expand your heart to a place you didn’t know existed a few months ago. You get to love these people who you didn’t meet until now.”
Blessed indeed. If Dad was with me, then other angels were as well. The veil between us was thin. It was all one work we were doing, we angels and mortals—regardless of how we prayed or what language we spoke or what histories trailed behind us. It was the work of reconciliation—between nations, between tribes, between horrors in the past and hope in the future; between judgment and mercy; between God and all of humanity.
The next day, Abbe Veron took me to the many schools he had funded with a prize he received for a book. Later, we went to the big project still under construction: the university. Education was his solution to the atrocities of the past and the indolence of the present. The university would eventually include dormitories for those who lived far away. The seven offices would have computers. There would be fifty classrooms, as well as a large amphitheater for plays, workshops, conferences, and presentations.
One building, on a hill, was already under construction. The rest were merely marked, awaiting funding which had not yet come.
This was the future. The fact that it was already under construction was a signal to the whole village to cast their eyes up to a new day. This was where the generation whose parents lost family and hope would re-cast their dreams. This is where they would claim the promises which had been so brutally disrupted. This is where Abbe Veron and others would teach the fundamentals of morality which had been betrayed and uprooted, and where men and women would also learn about science and technology, preparing to become doctors, healers, scholars, inventors. It was also where I would teach English just a three months later.
I was in Lodja for five days in August—and was honored when Abbe Veron asked that I be moved closer to my new family—him and the other Margaret. This time, I was picked up not by a driver in a large van, but by l’abbe’s assistant—on a motorcycle.
I had been promoted. At least, that’s how my dad would see it.
To be continued
[i] I recorded an interview with Abbe Veron, aka On Okundji Ekanga Blaise Veron Okavu, so some of the words I’m attributing to him are actually from the interview, though many were said on our walk.
