Joel Kabamba spoke with the Missouri On Mic team at the Adair County Public Library in May.
He is the pastor for the french speaking Congolese community in Kirksville and he spoke about the ongoing violence in his home country.
A brief note that this episode contains content that some listeners might find disturbing.
Missouri on Mic is an oral history and journalism project documenting stories from around the state in its 200th year.
Joel Kabamba: I am from the Congo. I was, I was born in the Congo, I grew up in a city called Kisangani and was great it's a very big city.
And in 2001, there was a very big war in my city for six days, more than six thousand bombs had been thrown in the city.
Thousands of people have been killed. Two different countries were fighting to control the city, Uganda and Rwanda.
They've been fighting in my my hometown, and I lost friends, I lost families, I lost many people in that war.
It's one of the worst memories of my life.
So now I am in Kirksville, Missouri, and I work for the health department. I have two jobs. I work for the health department in daytime and nighttime, I work for Home Depot.
And I also am a preacher, I lead a congregation here in town.
At First Baptist Church, we have our English services for American and French services for French speaking people.
So I would say first of all, I would say it's, uh, God's plan. I didn't plan to be in Missouri. I've never known anything about Kirksville.
I was planning to go to Washington, DC.
But before I come, God brought me into Kirksville. I don't know what happened, but God sent me here.
Ah, my hope is that people all over U.S. can know where we are from from the Congo, and can know that there is a war in the Congo, which has been going for the past two decades, and more than 10 million Congolese have been killed, that nobody knows about, and people are being killed every day.
"I want people to know that every phone, every computer they have, has the blood of Congolese, because it's called, I think, cobalt that helps the phone batteries to last longer."
Why? Because the country is very, very, very rich.
I want people to know that every phone, every computer they have, has the blood of Congolese, because it's called, I think, cobalt that helps the phone batteries to last longer.
The Congo has 35 to 45% of the world.
They wage wars, they pay people to go to Congo to kill so that they can have everything there that they want.
What I want is for people to be aware of the war that is going on in my country every single day.
People are being killed, women are being raped, babies are being raped every single day in the Congo.
More than 10 million people have been killed.
So it'd be good if people get to know about it and talk about it. So to stop the killing, that would be great.
