More Than Four Million Lives Lost in African Country in the Last Decade

By: Ben Affleck 

Because these travesties have happened in relative obscurity — for example, 16 times as many people have died in Congo as have in the terrible ongoing genocide in Darfur, yet far more has been heard about Western Sudan than Central Africa — one goal here is to simply raise awareness. The hope being that a spotlight's glare might help in a place where too much suffering has happened in the dark and also help those who are already hard at work trying to help themselves and their country.

My trip brought me to camps for people displaced from their homes, to rural hospitals, to gold mines, and even to remote operations with the United Nations designed to "sensitize" the most violent and vicious of the foreign-born militia in an effort to encourage them to return to their country of origin. I met with warlords and peacemakers, survivors and aid workers, all in an effort to try and better understand the inner workings of a terribly and yet wonderfully complex place, in the hopes of sharing that understanding with you.

I urge you to watch Thursday's "Nightline" report. I know this place and its people will move you as they have moved me. I do not believe that we live in boxes, separated from one another by imagined boundaries. The connected human chain which binds us demands that we contribute, even if only in some small way, to the betterment of the world. Congo is a place that deserves, at the very least, our eyes and our ears.

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