Mariam couldn’t take her eyes off her phone, so intent that she didn’t hear me when I spoke to her during coffee time after worship. When she finally lifted her head, her eyes were full of tears. She showed me a video from a friend from her home country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A young woman, her head wrapped in a cloth, sat motionless, holding tiny babies, twins. They were in a tent, holes torn in its sides. Mariam said, “She has no food, nothing. She just had two babies.”

It was February 2024, and Mariam was grieving over the latest crisis in Congo’s decades-long pattern of war and unrest. While western media doesn’t pay much attention, international desire for eastern Congo’s rich mineral deposits, used in cell phones and other electronics, drives cross-border conflict and has left millions dead or homeless. In the last year or so, trouble has flared up again, following a pattern: a paramilitary group, backed with outside money and equipment, empties villages near a coveted mineral vein, intimidating, raping, and killing residents. Many women are left in a truly desperate state, abandoned by their husbands if they are believed to be pregnant due to sexual violence. Hundreds of thousands of villagers have fled to Goma, the largest city in the region, where Mariam grew up.

Goma, with a population of two million before the current conflict, was not equipped to receive so many. Overcrowded camps sprang up around the city and disease spread swiftly. As Mariam began to tell me about the new refugee crisis, I asked how their hospital was handling the influx of needy families. Mariam and her husband, Stany Muhindo, told me it was struggling, without enough medicine or food. Refugees waited in the streets for care the hospital could not provide.

Orphans Helping Orphans

Stany’s parents, noncombatants in eastern Congo, were killed when he was nine. Mariam’s mother died when she was four. The Muhindos came to the US as refugees in 2008. First sent to Louisiana by the State Department, they and their two sons soon moved to Rhode Island, where Congolese friends lived. Stany worked as a CNA, drove Uber, and worked in a commercial bakery. Mariam sewed dresses for the African community and worked at the bakery as well. Two daughters joined the family. They began attending Christ (East Providence, R.I.) RPC, joining in 2013. Stany was ordained as a deacon in 2023.

In 2013, Stany and Mariam founded a small orphanage in Goma for street children, who were often forced into child prostitution. Named Watoto Kwa Babu (Swahili for “My Grandpa’s House”), the orphanage was almost completely funded by the Muhindos and Stany’s older sister, Clementine Bahati, and her husband. “We know the pain of being an orphan,” said Stany.

Stany and Mariam made significant financial sacrifices to support this work. Stany worked two jobs and the family of six rented a third-floor walk-up apartment, even as refugee friends in Providence began to buy homes. Our church held freewill offerings in support of Kwa Babu, but needs were many, and finances remained tenuous.

A Big Dream: The Hospital Begins

The orphans had many medical needs, but local hospitals were expensive. Working remotely through trusted employees, the Muhindos hired a doctor and nurse and set up a one-room clinic inside the orphanage to save costs. They soon realized that opening their clinic to the public might provide funding to support the orphanage, so they prayed, and requested a government permit for a medical clinic, usually a long and difficult process. To their surprise, the government granted a certificate for a medical center, not a clinic, allowing a larger facility with more staff.

When Stany received the permit, he said, “This is big now.…We need to have a big dream.” Centre Médicale Maman Clémentine (French for “Mother Clementine’s Medical Center,” or CMMC) opened in 2017, in a small rented house. CMMC was named, at the Muhindos’ suggestion, in honor of Stany’s older sister, who had taken his mother’s place in his life when his parents died and who now lives in Denmark.

The new financial model worked well until the recent crisis. Kwa Babu orphanage (currently home to 48 children) is funded by hospital fees, even though CMMC is the cheapest hospital in Goma. Vulnerable patients—the jobless, disabled, and orphans—are treated for free. Christian doctors volunteer and are paid small sums for their work, although the Muhindos hope to progress to full-time salaries. With a staff of 3 doctors and 12 nurses, they hire only Christians, and they are one of two hospitals in Goma that do not offer abortions. (Abortion is illegal in D. R. Congo, but international NGOs pressure hospitals they fund to perform them anyway, Stany says.) A chaplain visits on weekends and prayer is held daily. CMMC has moved into a 65-bed building, which they built using a bank loan, on land owned by Stany and Clementine’s family. In need of more space, they have opened another clinic, called Sharing Hope. The Muhindos finally purchased a home in Providence for themselves in 2021. As Stany says, “God is good, with prayer and prayer.”

Outside Help

As CMMC’s ministry to women and babies grew, so did the need for equipment. A surgeon and Christ RPC member, Malcolm Kirk, recommended that Stany contact Project C.U.R.E., a nonprofit that distributes donated medical supplies. In 2022, CMMC received the gift of a 40-foot shipping container full of medical equipment worth $100,000, based on a wish list created by CMMC doctors. Delivery of the container was not provided by Project C.U.R.E., so shipping costs were covered from within our congregation. The tricky shipping process required a trip to Congo for Stany, finally an American citizen and free to travel.

At the top of the doctors’ wish list was an ultrasound machine, which Project C.U.R.E. was unable to provide. Malcolm, who has missions hospital experience, in consultation with an ultrasound technician in our church, selected a machine, and the cost was covered privately by a Christ RPC family. Malcolm described the delivery process as “hair raising.” At one point, UPS International sent an email indicating the machine was headed to Cambodia! But God was good, and the ultrasound machine arrived safely. More recently, a machine for the second clinic was purchased using Christ RPC freewill offerings and mercy funds and delivered with less drama.

But outside help has been hard to come by. To date, in addition to help from the Muhindos and Clementine, CMMC has only received financial assistance from Project C.U.R.E. and Christ RPC and its members, plus a donation of eyeglasses from Denmark.

After Mariam shared about the current crisis in Goma in February, our deacons arranged an emergency freewill offering, raising funds to provide medicine and food for the refugees at CMMC. To our surprise, CMMC publicized the donation, making a banner thanking our church and displaying boxes of medicine they purchased! The donation was featured on a local radio station and an online news video, interviewing CMMC staff and patients, calling for more help for refugees, and thanking our church for support.

Since February, the situation in Goma has remained difficult. CMMC remains overstretched. In June, Stany summarized: “Currently all food supply routes are cut off; the population is in a situation of confinement accentuating the suffering and life threatening. Families, churches, schools, hospitals, and streets are flooded by those displaced by wars, among them: children, young people, pregnant women, elderly and sick people. Food and medicine are basic needs in Goma.”

Would You Pray?

Stany and Mariam love Goma. If you ask them about their home, they will tell you about beautiful Lake Kivu nearby, one of Africa’s Great Lakes; the volcano, Mount Nyiragongo, where coffee is grown; and Virunga National Park, where visitors can see gorillas in the wild. They will tell you how big Goma has become, now second only to the capital, Kinshasa.

But above all, they love the people of Goma. They want to see Goma at peace, “every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid” (Mic. 4:4). The conflict is too big and tangled for one family to solve. But God is sovereign over mining rights. He sees every orphaned street child, every woman pregnant by rape, every family grieving a young man killed by tribal conflict. They are doing what they can, with what they have been given, to obey Psalm 82:3: “Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.”

Please pray for CMMC and for Stany and Mariam. Pray for peace in eastern Congo. Pray for wisdom in allocating resources, and for more resources. And pray with confidence that God will answer, as in Psalm 10:14: “But you do see, for you note mischief and vexation, that you may take it into your hands; to you the helpless commits himself; you have been the helper of the fatherless.”

To find out more about CMMC and its ministry, contact the deacon board of Christ RPC (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)), or visit cmmc-goma.net.