Name: Period:

Warmups for the week of January 27-31,2014

Warm up A1. Locate the Democratic Republic

of the Congo (DRC) on the map to the left and put a star on it?

2. What is the relative location of the DRC? (What countries is it near?)

3. What is the exact location (latitude and longitude) of the DRC?

4. The western tip of the DRC touches which ocean?

Warm up B The Origins of War in the DRC, The Atlantic

How the region became overrun by warlords and lacking any kind of functional government.ARMIN ROSEN JUNE 26 2013, 11:59 AM ET

The conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, which I visited over the last week of April, has killed somewhere between 3.5 and 5.4 million people since 1996. It destroys human life in crushing and un-cinematic fashion. Its victims live deep in the mountains of central Africa, and despite the efforts of a few intrepid journalists, scholars, and human rights observers, their suffering goes largely undocumented. They include peasant women who are raped collecting firewood, children dying of cholera in bulging refugee camps, and starving young boys conscripted into militia groups so numerous that experts have trouble keeping track of them all. The DRC's conflict might be the deadliest since World War II, and one of world's worst active crises. But it also may be the most obscure -- the most anonymous.

In Kitchanga, the conflict erupted into view during a bloody week in February and March. The aftermath is still visible, although the journey there is a torrid demonstration of how the land, a blinding-green labyrinth of steep valleys bordered with jagged volcanic hills, can mask the tragedies contained within it. The road from Goma, the eastern DRC's largest city, rises into the mountains of the East African Rift, where villages stand silhouetted against the distant shores of Lake Kivu, a harmony of sloping green and mesmeric blue that stretches far into an unpolluted sky. As the road climbs, travelers can have the illusion of being eye-level with the white smoke billowing from the Nyiragongo volcano, alone in the center of the gaping mountain-ringed valley.

5. What is the title of this article?

6. Since 1996, how many people have been killed in the war in the Congo?

7. Describe the physical terrain of the Congo?

Warm up C The conflict in eastern Congo is so fully encompassing that everything seems to sustain it, whether it intends to or not.In the center of town, merchants peddled shoes and dress clothes in the skeletons of burned-out structures, and in the bare concrete lots where buildings had recently stood. The downtown was a checkerboard of charred rectangles marked with lonely support beams and piles of stone and ground-up cement. Life continued amid the ruins: rivulets of creek water gushed through the central drag, where motor taxi drivers washed their vehicles and young children bathed in crowded gutters. Columns of soldiers from the Congolese military, called the FARDC, hogged the center of a street bursting with commerce and activity -- the city continued living, paying little mind to its own physical destruction. Sellers had set up along the frontage of a building that had nearly collapsed, and the crowds were so thick that I barely realized that its sagging and ruined backside was still the best-preserved structure in sight.

8. Provide two pieces of evidence that shows that the Democratic Republic of the Congo is still in a constant state of war?

9. Provide a piece of evidence that supports the following claim: “People in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have become so use to warfare that it has become a normal part of life.”

Warm up D

This was naked evidence of war, burned-out testimony to a violent mania that had ground the physical environment to asphalt -- it's a place that reminded me of descriptions I had read of burned-out cities in Syria or Mali or the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. Yet the network of problems gripping the easternmost quarter of the DRC -- "war" seems like lazy shorthand in a place with 30 armed groups -- isn't about competing visions of the country's future or about the fate of nations or ideas. Capitalism isn't fighting communism; there are no Sunnis fighting Shiites, or Kurds fighting Turks; no philosophical, religious, or national destinies in clash. Violence isn't a means to a higher end in DRC, but the expression of a deeper social, political and historical rot. Here, it's possible to witness how war can become systemic and normal, even in the absence of some broader, national-level struggle -- how a region can become trapped in violent tension and mistrust.

10. According to this last section of the article, why does war continue in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?

Warm up E

11. Reflection: Thinking back to before you read this article, have you ever heard any news stories about a war going on in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?

12. In a complete sentence, describe why do you think this is, based on what you read, and what you believe?