The same nun who sent me the video from the COMMUS mine in Kolwezi showing Congolese workers being whipped like old-world African slaves while their Chinese bosses looked on, estimated that post-COVID, more than two-thirds of the children across the Copper Belt were not in school. According to her, almost all these children were digging in cobalt mines and becoming increasingly “sick, wounded, and orphaned.” Considering the worsening catastrophe, she asked a simple and clarifying question: How can a sustainable future be built through sacrificing the very bearers of that future, through
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