Stranger In The Night. Catherine Palmer

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      Liz Wallace turned a page in her scrapbook and ran a fingertip over the photograph of her parents waving goodbye at St. Louis’s Lambert Airport. They had no clue that within three days, their precious child would be sitting down to a meal of roasted bush rat.

      In fact, they never found out the whole story. You couldn’t just fire off an e-mail that read, Hi Mom and Dad. Ate monkey meat and fried termites for dinner today.

      This was not the kind of thing that would boost their enthusiasm for Liz’s dreams of becoming a foreign aid worker. Of course, her brief trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo hadn’t exactly been about transforming the plight of a Third World nation. She and her college teammates went to help rebuild a primary school that had been hit too many times by mortar fire. They put up a few walls and hurried home.

      But that trip, more than a year before, had changed Liz’s life. The moment she graduated from college, she took a job with Refugee Hope, a resettlement agency in St. Louis. Her goal: to learn Swahili, enter a training program and move to Africa to work for the United Nations in refugee camps.

      On this stifling night, unable to sleep after long hours toting supplies to incoming families from Burma and Bosnia, Liz couldn’t sleep. Not unusual. Most days she was so exhausted she could hardly stand up. But after arriving home to her studio apartment, eating a quick bite of dinner and checking her schedule for the next day, she felt her second wind kick in. Wide-awake and unable to turn off her brain by 2:00 a.m., she made a cup of decaf tea and settled on her sofa with the scrapbook.

      Liz turned the page and studied the faces gazing back at her, impassive and worn. She had briefly considered decorating the page in the colors of the Congo flag and placing stickers of wild animals here and there. But why distract from the beauty of the Congolese people with their buttery chocolate skin and deep eyes?

      Yet what suffering the people had endured. Until that trip, Liz had never heard of such horrors. She understood now that Rwanda’s civil war had sent nearly a million refugees pouring over the border into Congolese camps. When those refugees began to build power to retake their homeland, they enlisted the help of men in Congo’s government. That brought resistance.

      War began in Congo in the fall of 1996, complete with genocide, looting and genital mutilation. In some areas, soldiers raped more than half the women. Almost fifty thousand children were kidnapped and forced into combat, slave labor, sexual servitude.

      Not long after a cease-fire was signed in 1999, insurgent groups led a second uprising. Yet another peace treaty was signed in 2003. By the time Liz arrived in Kinshasa, more than four million people had died. Some were killed in the conflict, but most perished from disease and starvation.

      Three million were homeless. Houses, hospitals and schools lay in rubble. Fields and food supplies were burned. People hovered on the brink of starvation.

      Under the umbrella organization of Refugee Hope, Liz cared for many of those woeful survivors who arrived in St. Louis. She wasn’t doing much to help, though. Her job was mostly desk work. Filing government forms.

      She wondered if anyone could prevent genocide. Probably not.