08-08-2025
Congo's Teens Brave Bombs, Rebels and Abduction to Play Hoops
When the bombings and gun battles in the Congolese city of Goma finally abated, teens across the city slipped out of the homes they had been hiding in since a rebel invasion started. They were all headed to the same place.
Moise Bandeke, 14, picked his way through brass bullet casings, searching for a motorcycle taxi in the deserted streets. Levi Amissi, also 14, nervously looked out from the bus he had boarded. Nelly Kavira, 19, chose to walk, but the farther she got from home, the more frightened she became, as she passed hundreds of mud-caked military uniforms abandoned by soldiers fleeing the rebels.
They knew they were risking their lives, venturing out in the aftermath of a rebel takeover of their city, where U.N. experts were documenting hundreds of beatings, arrests and executions by the rebels, as well as grave crimes committed by fleeing soldiers.
But all three had the same objective: to get back on the basketball court.
CENTRAL AFRICAN
REPUBLIC
SOUTH
SUDAN
UGANDA
Rep. of
congo
Goma
Rwanda
Democratic
Republic
of Congo
BURUNDI
Kinshasa
TANZANIA
AFRICA
ZAMBIA
ANGOLA
Detail area
300 miles
By The New York Times
Generations of children from Congo's east have grown up amid near-constant conflict — conflict that is ongoing in rural areas, despite a peace deal recently brokered by the United States. But in Goma, over the past two decades, thousands of those children have had a lifeline: a youth basketball academy, Promo Jeune Basket in French, or P.J.B.
Every day until the most recent phase of war erupted in January, around 1,500 young people — from children barely out of toddlerhood to gangly 22-year-olds — had flocked to P.J.B.'s 11 cracked concrete courts to dribble and pass, the simultaneous thwack of many balls echoing across tin-roofed houses and low walls made of lava lumps from the volcano that looms, and occasionally explodes, over the city.
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