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Joseph Lusi, a Glasgow-trained, Congolese orthopedic surgeon who's built like George Foreman and as articulate as Muhammad Ali, habitually starts his day with prayer. But the morning of October 30, 1996, was different. He was dodging bullets and sheltering from incoming mortar shells.

At dawn, rebels had launched a stealth attack on Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) near Rwanda. The fighters had filtered through the border overnight. By daybreak, they were drilling the town with machine gun fire and pounding it with explosives.

Lusi was then director of a Baptist mission hospital, which was located near a military base. The hospital was engulfed in fierce fighting. Staff and able-bodied patients scampered. So did Lusi. A bathroom looked safe. He locked himself in.

The bbc knows no manners. A British journalist called Lusi's satellite phone. The surgeon became a live radio broadcaster, narrating what he saw and heard to a worldwide audience. While on he was on the air, a bomb exploded in the hospital compound.

"I will go and see," Lusi said.

Silence.

In London, Lusi's sister-in-law was tuned in when he went incommunicado. Alarmed by the steady silence, she called Lusi's wife, Gwendolyn, then in Nairobi.

Gwendolyn immediately hit the road. In three days, she found herself stuck at the DRC border. Locals slipped into war-ravaged Goma to scout for her husband.

An indelible image is stamped on her mind: She saw Lusi in a blood-bathed white doctor's gown walking across the border toward her. He had been fixing limbs all weekend—possibly the only surgeon on duty in the city.

How had he survived? When the fighting got ferocious, he and a remnant staff of five hid in the ceiling. The slender ones, who could slide into the roof, had planned to pull Lusi up. But he was too heavy. So the staff jumped down, placed a stool on top of a table, and pushed him through. Gwendolyn chuckles when telling the story.

"Christians should not run from trouble," says Lusi, now director of HEAL Africa, an indigenous ministry that operates a 156-bed hospital, trains medical professionals, and offers HIV-prevention services and holistic AIDS care.

"We should be where God wants us to be."

Unless God says otherwise, this former Belgian colony in central Africa, the combined size of Alaska and Texas, is not the place to be.

The statistics are depressing. The country's 62 million people live with an infant mortality rate that is ten times higher than that of the U.S. Nearly 50 percent of the population is under age 16, and few will celebrate a 50th birthday. Ten years of war exacerbates the brevity of life. More than 3.9 million have died since 1996, when perpetual fighting first broke out. The conflict has drawn in 16 military and rebel forces from seven nations in central Africa. The largest UN peacekeeping force in the world (19,800 "blue helmets") is stationed in DRC. Fighting persists despite the 2003 peace accords and withdrawal of foreign troops.

"We live in fear," confesses Bayoba Biguge, a church leader in Bukavu, an eastern border city of 1 million. Rebel groups fight each other and the government over territory and the mining of diamonds, gold, and coltan (vital for manufacturing electronics). Illegal trade makes the conflict highly profitable. Coltan has sold for as much as $400 per kilogram.

DRC's missions history is equally grim. The nation is the graveyard for hundreds of Western missionaries. In 1964, American Paul Carlson, a medical missionary with the Evangelical Covenant Church, was shot and killed while trying to escape rebel killings. He stopped to help another missionary climb over a wall when machine gun fire ended his life.

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July 2006, Vol. 50, No. 7