My name is Evan Vetter. I am a film maker.  I met Robin Tabbiner and Wendy Merritt in Wilmington, North Carolina, a beach town where life moves at a slower pace - a town where it's not uncommon to wear flip-flops to the office or leave work early with your surfboard in tow.

Robin met Wendy when she joined her small group in 2005, a women’s bible study she lead through Port City Community Church (where I worked doing media projects). Robin, who had graduated from college the spring before, had been planning a move to Africa - she was just waiting for the right time and opportunity. Wendy was leading a very “normal” life – after college, she had settled down in Wilmington, bought a house and was working for a local mortgage brokerage firm; it had never crossed her mind to pick up and move halfway around the world.

One day while I was at work I heard our missions director, Christie, telling someone about two young women that wanted to move to the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Like most Americans the only place in Africa that I knew anything about were the ones we talk about because of the terrible things happening there.  The genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the current one in Darfur, these issues for me like many others - made me wonder why they were able to happen - but then my busy day would get in the way - and the passing thought of these people and their problems somehow disappeared in the midst of my day.

I asked Christie what made Congo so special.  She sent me an article in Time magazine about the conflict.  I was shocked.  The numbers alone were more shocking than anything I could have imagined.  Millions dead, a thousand dying a day, and thousands upon thousands of rape victims were the continuing wake of a bloody war that had "ended" but somehow continued to take lives even after it's offical close.  And what shocked me more - was that two women from my own community intended to go in to this Red Zone and serve for one year.

When I learned of their plans to move to a country that our own State Department warns us to stay away from, I knew we had to tell their story. For three months before Robin and Wendy left for Congo, I spent time interviewing them, as well as their families and friends; they left the country armed with a video camera and plenty of tapes to document their experience.  Our collective hope was that their story and the stories of the Congolese women and children they went to serve would move us all to get involved.

Watch their story - and if it moves you - do something about it.  I am just a film maker.  They are just two women with a passion for the people that they met.  But all of us can make a difference and hopefully help bring peace to this area of the world that so desperately needs it by sharing the story of the Congolese.

And that continues to be our hope.  We hope that their story moves you to get involved in some way!  Here are just three:

WATCH the podcasts

PRAY for the Congolese

SHARE their story with everyone you know

DONATE to the Julie Project (a shelter that is being built - aimed at helping the women where Robin and Wendy worked)

To find out more about the rape crisis in the DR Congo

click here

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To find out more about this project visit congocast.org or watch the trailer for the podcast below: 

Congocast.org Trailer from Congocast.org on Vimeo.