Congo Dawn
PRAISE FOR JEANETTE WINDLE
“Windle is a top-notch storyteller.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“Jeanette Windle’s Congo Dawn brings home the profound truth that God’s love and human suffering are not impossible contradictions, but a divine paradox those refined in the fires of adversity are best equipped to understand.”
DR. BRUCE WILKINSON, internationally bestselling author of The Prayer of Jabez
“Jeanette Windle writes about the darkest corners of the world with absolute authority, using dogged research, an eye for detail, and her talents as a storyteller to make the reader feel absolutely there.”
MINDY STARNS CLARK, bestselling author of The Amish Midwife
“Congo Dawn is a riveting story by Jeanette Windle, whose realism and attention to detail are second to none.”
ANDRES SCHWARTZ, former US Navy SEAL
“Author Jeanette Windle paints a picture of the great Ituri Rainforest and its people that is so real I was whisked back to the Africa of my childhood. . . . An artistic triumph.”
TAMAR MYERS, bestselling author of The Witch Doctor’s Wife
“Jeanette Windle’s portrayal of a female interpreter attached to Congo mercenaries creates a gripping story of forgiveness, hope, and love.”
MARTHA MUNCE, vice president, Munce Group
“When it comes to international intrigue and the impact of Christ in hard settings, no one bests Jeanette Windle. Congo Dawn is another of her riveting stories.”
GAYLE ROPER, bestselling author of Autumn Dreams
“Enthralling! Windle’s masterful touch shines, [and] out of darkness and despair comes Congo Dawn, a gripping, heartbreaking tale that will infuse readers with a thirst for justice.”
RONIE KENDIG, Christy Award–winning author of Wolfsbane
“Congo Dawn is that rare high-energy novel that doesn’t just leave you breathless but with a good deal to think about once you close the book.”
DON HOESEL, author of Elisha’s Bones and Serpent of Moses
“A heart-pounding ride ripped from the headlines with an added punch of humanity that will tug at your heart and leave you looking at the world in a different light.”
LISA HARRIS, author of Christy Award finalist Blood Ransom and 2011 Romantic Times best inspirational novel Blood Covenant
“I am really impressed with Jeanette’s ability to transport readers to an unfamiliar environment. . . . It’s obvious from the first pages that Jeanette really knows and cares about the Congo.”
KAY MARSHALL STROM, award-winning author of the Grace in Africa series
“I loved this book. Jeanette Windle always delivers strong stories, characters you will fall in love with, and a spiritual theme that will either drive you to your Bible or to your knees. Once again, Jeanette delivers with another wonderful book that will keep you up late flipping the pages as fast as you can read.”
WANDA DYSON, bestselling author of Judgment Day and Shepherd’s Fall
“‘Where is God in our darkest night?’ The myriad story threads in Congo Dawn all do revolve around this question. Jeanette’s genius is in how she weaves them all together, and in the flawed yet ultimately lovable characters she writes about.”
WAMBURA KIMUNYU, author, publisher, and international board member, Media Associates International, Nairobi, Kenya
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Congo Dawn
Copyright © 2013 by Jeanette Windle. All rights reserved.
Cover photograph copyright © R. Tyler Gross/Getty Images. All rights reserved.
Author photograph copyright © 2007 by Hirtech Camera Center. All rights reserved.
Designed by Dean H. Renninger
Edited by Caleb Sjogren
Published in association with the literary agency of Stan Guthrie Communications, 1102 Dawes Ave., Wheaton, IL 60189.
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version,® NIV.® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com.
John 1:5, quoted in chapter 44, is taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version,® NIV.® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com.
Congo Dawn is a work of fiction. Where real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales appear, they are used fictitiously. All other elements of the novel are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Windle, Jeanette.
Congo dawn / Jeanette Windle.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-4143-7158-0 (sc)
1. Americans—Congo (Democratic Republic)—Fiction. 2. Suspense fiction. 3. Christian fiction. I. Title.
PS3573.I5172C66 2013
813'.54—dc23 2012036151
Printed in the United States of America
19181716151413
7654321
Build: 2013-01-02 16:47:32
To the medical personnel, mission pilots, and other volunteers who courageously and selflessly continue to shine bright the light of Yesu’s (Jesus’) love in the darkness that is today’s Ituri conflict zone, especially those who have contributed to this story—you know who you are—I dedicate this book.
While all events, characters, and the jungle mission clinic of Taraja (“Hope”) itself are completely fictional, the story of Congo Dawn was inspired in part by its true-life Ituri Rainforest counterparts, Nebobongo and Nyankunde, targets of brutal massacres and destruction by insurgent rebels during the 1964 and 2002 uprisings in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
About the Author
Discussion Questions
PROLOGUE
Paradise Lost.
That translated piece of literature written by a long-ago foreign poet had been a favorite of Jesuit monks who’d taught a Congolese orphan boy his letters
and their language many years ago. Perhaps because they’d felt just so at their exile to his own country.
“Baba. Father. Have you not understood what I said? With these we can now make a paradise out of our home.”
Father and son stood on a stony outcropping that thrust skyward over the rainforest canopy, one of dozens of the strange rock formations that rose like termite mounds above the treetops, their stony composition bearing no apparent relation to the sandy soil or red clay that made up the jungle floor. Burial mounds of the Ancient Ones, tribal legends avowed before pale-skinned foreigners arrived to teach terms like igneous and volcanic anomaly.
“Baba, do you not see what a miracle this is? As great a miracle as finding you alive again. The Almighty at last has chosen to shower favor upon us. This place, our people, will never be the same again.”
The tall, ebony-skinned youth was dressed incongruously for this place in collared shirt, slacks, and such shiny black shoes as his feet had never known during their growing years. But anxious, dark eyes and beaming smile were the same, though he now held out a handful of gray pebbles rather than the schoolwork of his boyhood. In years past, his father could have responded with unstinted praise, but now he shifted his own bare feet to look down over the cliff edge.
The clearing below stretched to the banks of a wide, lazy river, its water the dark tannin shade of tea, a drink the Jesuit monks had taught the older man to enjoy. Several dozen thatched mud-brick huts occupied the highest ground, beyond the reach of wet-season flooding. Women wrapped in the colorful lengths of homespun cloth called pagnes stooped among cultivations of cassava, maize, beans, yams, and peanuts. Others moved along a path from the riverbank, their graceful sway balancing pottery water jars on top of their heads.
Children too young for work or school scampered among banana plants, playing some game of running and hiding. On the river itself, a pair of hand-hewn wooden pirogues drifted lazily toward a bend where the watercourse disappeared back into untamed rainforest. Several village men, naked except for the same loincloth that was the older man’s sole dress, stood precariously on the canoe rims to cast fishing nets woven of thin, supple lianas. Drawing the nets from the water, they removed a few catfish and eel, then cast the nets again.
Paradise Lost.
There was a time when such had been the older man’s own opinion of this remote jungle locality. When this place had seemed to him an unjust and cruel exile.
Young then, younger than his last-born offspring now standing beside him, he’d been among his country’s first high school graduates after their colonial masters at last packed up and left. By then a Congolese army officer named Mobutu had seized control in their place. Renaming his country Zaire, he’d promised that its vast natural wealth would no longer enrich foreigners but instead provide a grand new world of prosperity, justice, and peace for the Congolese people. The older man standing on the rock outcropping had been the first appointed administrator for the schoolhouse and health outpost their new government had pledged to build in every village.
Life here had not then been so isolated. There’d been a road. Just a dirt track carved through the rainforest but wide enough for motorized vehicles. The road’s makers had not built it with any interest in the village. This region had none of the treasures its foreign masters had craved. No diamonds. No gold. No copper. Not even rich soil to be exploited for cotton, sugarcane, or other cash crops. It was simply a dot on the map. And though government tax collectors traveled the road, so did the army units who maintained a welcome stability.
Still, to a youth who’d known the amenities of a city, the taste of imported drink, the stimulation of books and travel, his appointment here had seemed more punishment than promotion. Unfortunately, he’d also been a kinless orphan without connections of blood or wealth to command better opportunities.
Why had he stayed? Especially since Mobutu’s new name for an ancient land had proved to last far longer than his promises. Instead of schools and medical centers, Mobutu with his sycophants and endless greedy relatives had built for themselves palaces, parks, and places of entertainment. Betrayal in turn spawned revolt. Rebel militias of every stripe and tribal allegiance became as much a part of the Congolese landscape as crumbling bridges, abandoned rail stations, and beached riverboats.
Perhaps it was no more complicated than a village girl with the ebony roundness, graceful lift of head under her water jar, and strong limbs of true female beauty who’d by then caught his eye. Since the riverbank community was in essence a single intermarried tribal clan, he’d acquired along with a wife the extended family he’d never known in that Jesuit orphanage.
The older man standing now at the cliff edge had not left the Ituri Rainforest again. When the promised concrete school building never materialized, he’d used his own government salary to raise a mud-brick community center. There he’d taught classes and administered rudimentary health care until growing troubles outside the rainforest cut off even that meager stipend. As motorized vehicles stopped passing through, the road grew over with lianas and ferns. Market goods were reduced to what could be lashed to the frames of occasional bicycles that still wore a narrow track along the old roadbed. The community center’s tin roofing gradually rusted away, to be replaced with the same thatch as the rest of the village.
By then the administrator had his own growing family. He’d kept them fed as other village families did by cultivating the soil, harvesting the abundance of rainforest and river. And he’d kept the school open, teaching each succeeding crop of boys and girls from the crumbling Swahili primers and Holy Scriptures that were the only books the village possessed. Though most considered squatting indoors over battered slates and mildewed pages a pointless exercise, there were a few with a hunger to learn who walked a full day down the overgrown road to where the foreign God-followers had healed the region’s sick and offered a higher education to their children.
Including this youngest son standing before him.
The boy had not been gone long when news trickled into the village with the last of the bicycle merchants that the white foreigners had been driven from the rainforest, their hospital and secondary school burned to the ground by raiding rebels, the town’s Congolese inhabitants massacred. To add terror were other rumors of villages wiped out by soldiers who were not rebels but wore the uniforms of government forces.
While war raged in the outside world, the village closed in upon itself. The bicycle trail was now a tangle of vegetation. Not in many seasons had their community received so much as a visitor from some other jungle village. For all they could know, they might be the only survivors left upon the planet.
Still, the schoolmaster, by now undisputedly acclaimed the village chief, continued to teach the children in faith that one day the road would open again to a wider world.
And the road had indeed opened to bring the return of a son he’d despaired still bore life. Leaning against a boulder down below was a small motorbike that had somehow pushed its way through the overgrown roadbed. The story his son told was not uncommon in the Congo. Among a few students evacuated with the white foreigners, he’d found himself in a refugee camp so far from home he could not have covered the distance in many days of walking. And other survivors had told him that every village in his Ituri district had been razed to the ground.
The boy’s education soon secured him employment as a translator. Seeing potential in the young man, the foreign aid workers sponsored him for further education, eventually even outside the Congo itself. When he’d at last made his way back to this place, it hadn’t been with any expectation of finding the village. But he’d been as delighted to discover his family still living as they were to receive him.
Not until he’d insisted his father climb this outcropping with him had he explained the real reason for his return. The older man shook his head now at the gray pebbles on his son’s outstretched palm, not in negation, but perplexity.
“All know our coun
try’s very bones are filled with great treasure. But there have been foreigners here before to make their tests on these hills. Back when your oldest brother was still at his mother’s breast. Graphite, they named this rock.”
Plucking a chunk from his son’s palm, he rubbed it across a nearby boulder. It left a dark streak. “See? These have proved useful enough to the children for forming their letters since we can no longer obtain pencils. But it is too common for the mining companies to come this far after it.”
“Those who came before were wrong, Baba. This is what I have been studying since I left you. Geology. Remember this? The collection I made as a boy when you first taught us of the treasures a rock can hold?”
Yes, the older man recognized the small, lumpy bag crafted from sun-cured duiker hide. He remembered, too, the boy’s disappointment that the glitter of a pyrite pebble was not in fact gold.
His son was still speaking. “Remember how angry I was that always it has been others—the foreigners, our own corrupt leaders—who reaped the benefit of such treasure and not the people under whose soil it was found? You taught me too not to hate or dwell on past injustices. To become a student and not a rebel. And as a student, I took my collection with me, even when I was running and in the refugee camp. I kept it because it was all I still had of this place. But when I found employment with a mining firm, I tested the rocks in their lab. And I found that those who came here long ago were wrong. That is not graphite you hold in your hand, but a treasure infinitely more valuable. A treasure not even known to exist in your childhood. Valuable enough to bring to this place employment and restored roads and electricity. Better schools and a hospital. All the goods and opportunities I have seen in the outside world that our people have so long been denied.”
The youth trailed off, for the first time registering that his father did not reflect his own excitement. “Why are you not rejoicing, Baba? Is this not what you have prayed for? A better life for our people? For the children you have taught?”
The village administrator was too troubled now to hide it from his expression. Was it for this he’d sent his son from the rainforest to seek a higher education and better world? Such naiveté? Such foolishness?