Willy Binene—Democratic Republic of the Congo

A young man in central Africa learns to trust in God’s timeline

What Kind of a Fly Bit You?

In August 1992, twenty-three-year-old Willy Sabwe Binene aspired to a career in electrical engineering. His training at the Institut Supérieur Technique et Commerciale in Lubumbashi, a city in the central African nation of Zaire, was going well. He had just finished his first year at the school and was already looking forward to continuing his formal education.

During the break between terms, Willy returned to his hometown, Kolwezi, some two hundred miles northwest of Lubumbashi. He and other members of his family belonged to the Kolwezi Branch of the Church. After the priesthood revelation of 1978, the restored gospel had spread beyond Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe to more than a dozen other countries in Africa: Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, the Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya, Namibia, Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho, Madagascar, and Mauritius. The first Latter-day Saint missionaries in Zaire arrived in 1986, and there were now about four thousand Saints in the country.

Shortly after Willy arrived in Kolwezi, his branch president called him in for an interview. “We need to prepare you to go on a full-time mission,” he said.

“I should continue with my studies,” Willy said, taken aback. He explained that he had three more years in his electrical engineering program.

“You should go on a mission first,” the branch president said. He pointed out that Willy was the first young man from the branch to be eligible for a full-time mission.

“No,” Willy said, “it won’t work. I’m going to finish up first.”

Willy’s parents were not happy when they found out he had turned down the branch president’s invitation. His mother, who was reserved by nature, asked him directly, “Why are you delaying?”

One day, the Spirit prompted Willy to visit his uncle Simon Mukadi. As he walked into his uncle’s living room, he noticed a book on a table. Something about it seemed to call to him. He moved closer and read the title: Le miracle du pardon, the French translation of Spencer W. Kimball’s The Miracle of Forgiveness. Intrigued, Willy picked the book up, let its pages fall open, and started to read.

The passage was about idolatry, and Willy quickly became engrossed. Elder Kimball wrote that people not only bowed down to gods of wood and stone and clay but also worshipped their own possessions. And some idols had no tangible form.

The words made Willy tremble like a leaf. He felt that the Lord was speaking directly to him. In an instant, all desire to finish school before his mission left him. He sought out his branch president and told him that he’d changed his mind.

“What kind of a fly bit you?” his branch president asked.

After Willy told him the story, the branch president took out a missionary application. “OK,” he said. “We start here, at the beginning.”

As Willy prepared for his mission, violence erupted in the region where he lived. Zaire was in Africa’s Congo River Basin, where various ethnic and regional groups had struggled against each other for generations. Recently, in Willy’s province, the governor had urged the Katangan majority to oust the minority Kasaians.

In March 1993, the violence spread to Kolwezi. Katangan militants prowled the streets, brandishing machetes, sticks, whips, and other weapons. They terrorized Kasaian families and burned their homes, caring little what people or goods were inside. Fearing for their lives, many Kasaians hid from the marauders or fled the city.

As a Kasaian, Willy knew it was only a matter of time before the militants hunted down his family. To avoid harm, he set aside his mission preparation to help his family flee to Luputa, a Kasaian town some 350 miles away, where some of his relatives lived.

Since trains out of Katanga were infrequent, hundreds of Kasaian refugees had set up a sprawling camp outside Kolwezi’s railway station. When Willy and his family arrived at the camp, they had no choice but to bed down beneath the stars until they could find shelter. The Church, the Red Cross, and other humanitarian organizations were at the camp to provide food, tents, and medical care for the refugees. Still, without proper sanitation, the camp reeked of human waste and burning garbage.

After a few weeks in the camp, the Binenes received word that a train could transport some of the camp’s women and children out of the area. Willy’s mother and four sisters decided to leave on the train with other family members. Willy, meanwhile, helped his father and older brother fix up a broken-down open freight car. When it was ready to travel, they hitched it to an outbound train and left the camp.

When he arrived at Luputa several weeks later, Willy could not help but contrast it to Kolwezi. The town was small and had no electricity, which meant he could not use his electrical engineering training for employment. And there was no branch of the Church.

“What are we going to do here?” he asked himself.

See the full text in Gospel Library for notes and source citations.

Remaining Faithful in Luputa

Life in Luputa was not what Willy Binene had imagined as an electrical engineering student in Lubumbashi. Luputa was a farming community, and as long as ethnic strife remained near their home in Kolwezi, he and his family would stay in Luputa and work the land.

Fortunately, Willy’s father had taught him how to farm when he was a boy, so he already knew the basics of raising beans, corn, cassava, and peanuts. Until the first bean crop came in, however, the family had very little food to eat. They farmed for sustenance, and what little they could spare from their crops they sold to purchase salt, oil, soap, and some meat.

Of the Saints who fled Kolwezi for safety, around fifty of them had settled in Luputa. There was no branch in the village, but they met together every week in a large house to worship. Although several men in the group held the priesthood, including the former Kolwezi District president, they did not feel authorized to hold sacrament meeting. Instead, they held a Sunday School class, with each elder taking a turn leading the meeting.

During this time, Willy and his fellow Saints made several efforts to contact the mission headquarters in Kinshasa, but without success. Still, whenever the Saints earned money, they set aside their tithing, waiting for a time when they could deliver it to an authorized Church leader.

One day in 1995, Willy’s family decided to send him back to Kolwezi to try to sell their old house. Knowing he would see the district president there, the Saints in Luputa saw this as their best chance to pay tithing. They placed their money in envelopes, gave them to Willy and another Church member traveling with him, and sent them on their way.

Throughout the four-day train ride to Kolwezi, Willy hid the bag with the tithing envelopes under his clothing. He and his traveling companion were nervous and afraid during the journey. They slept on the train and only disembarked at stations to buy fufu and other food. They also worried about traveling into Kolwezi, which was still hostile to Kasaians. But they took comfort in the story of Nephi retrieving the plates of brass. They trusted that the Lord would protect them and their tithing.

When they finally arrived in Kolwezi, they found the home of the district president, and he invited them to stay with him. Several days later, the new leaders of the Zaire Kinshasa Mission, Roberto and Jeanine Tavella, came to the city, and the district president introduced them to Willy and his traveling companion.

“They were members in the Kolwezi Branch,” the district president explained. “Because of what happened, they moved to Luputa. And now they’ve come. They wanted to meet you.”

“Tell me more,” President Tavella said. “You’re from Luputa?”

Willy told the president about their journey and how far they’d traveled. He then took out the tithing envelopes. “This is the tithing of the members in Luputa,” he said. “They set aside their tithing because they did not know where to take it.”

Without saying a word, President and Sister Tavella began to weep. “What faith you have,” the mission president finally said, his voice trembling.

Joy and peace flooded Willy. He believed that God would bless the Saints in Luputa for paying tithing. President Tavella counseled them to be patient. “When you get back, tell everyone in Luputa that I love them,” he said. “They are blessed by the Eternal Father, because I’ve never seen such faith.”

He promised to send one of his counselors to Luputa as soon as possible. “I don’t know how long it will take,” he said, “but the counselor will come.”

See the full text in Gospel Library for notes and source citations.

My Mission Is Here

In May 1997, the government of Zaire collapsed after years of warfare and political turmoil. President Mobutu Sese Seko, who had controlled the nation for more than three decades, was dying, and he was now powerless to stop the demise of his regime. Armed forces from Rwanda, Zaire’s neighbor to the east, had entered the country in search of exiled rebels from its own civil war. Other eastern African nations had soon followed, ultimately joining forces with other groups to oust the weakened president, replace him with a new leader, and rename the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC.

The Church continued to function in the region as the conflict raged. Around six thousand Saints lived in the DRC. The Kinshasa Mission covered five countries with seventeen full-time missionaries. In July 1996, several couples from the region had traveled over seventeen hundred miles to receive their temple blessings in the Johannesburg South Africa Temple. A few months later, on November 3, Church leaders organized the Kinshasa Stake, the first stake in the DRC and the first French-speaking stake in Africa. There were also five districts and twenty-six branches spread throughout the mission.

In Luputa, Willy Binene, now twenty-seven years old, still hoped to serve a full-time mission, despite the unrest in his country. But when he shared his hope to Ntambwe Kabwika, a counselor in the mission presidency, he received disappointing news.

“My brother,” President Kabwika told him, “the age limit is twenty-five years. There is no way to call you on a mission.” Then, trying to console him, he added, “You are still young. You can go to school, get married.”

But Willy did not feel consoled. Disappointment welled up inside of him. It seemed unfair that his age prevented him from serving a mission. Why couldn’t an exception be made, especially after all that had happened to him? He wondered why the Lord had inspired him to serve a mission in the first place. He had postponed his education and career to follow that prompting—and for what?

“You can’t be troubled by this,” he eventually told himself. “You can’t very well condemn God.” He resolved to stay right where he was and do all the Lord asked of him.

Later, in July 1997, the Saints in Luputa were formally organized into a branch. After Willy was called as a financial clerk and branch missionary, he came to realize the Lord had been preparing him to establish the Church where he lived. “OK,” he said, “my mission is here.”

A few other Saints in the Luputa Branch were also called as branch missionaries. Three days a week, Willy tended his crops. The other days he would go door-to-door telling people about the gospel. Afterward, Willy would wash his only pair of trousers so they would be clean the next day. He wasn’t quite sure what drove him to preach the gospel so diligently, especially at times when he had to go out on an empty stomach. But he knew that he loved the gospel, and he wanted his people—and someday his ancestors—to have the blessings he had.

The work could be challenging. Some people threatened the branch missionaries or warned others to avoid them. A few people in the village even gathered together to destroy copies of the Book of Mormon. “Burn the Book of Mormon,” they’d say, “and the Church will disappear.”

Yet Willy saw the Lord work miracles through his efforts. Once, when he and his companion knocked on a door, it opened into a foul-smelling house. From inside, they heard a quiet voice calling out to them. “Come in,” it said. “I’m sick.”

Willy and his companion were afraid to enter the house, but they stepped inside and found a man who seemed to be wasting away. “Can we pray?” they asked.

The man agreed, so they offered a prayer, blessing him that his disease would go away. “We’ll be back tomorrow,” they told him.

The next day, they found the man outside his house. “You are men of God,” he said. Since their prayer, he had been feeling better. He wanted to jump for joy.

The man was not yet ready to join the Church, but others were. Every week, Willy and the other missionaries met people—sometimes whole families—who wanted to worship with the Saints. On some Saturdays, they baptized up to thirty people.

The Church in Luputa was beginning to grow.

See the full text in Gospel Library for notes and source citations.

The Lord Had Other Plans

In early 2006, Willy Binene was eager to move to Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to continue his training in electrical engineering. For thirteen years, he’d been working as a farmer in the village of Luputa, some nine hundred miles from the city.

He was now married to a young woman named Lilly, whom he had baptized during his service as a branch missionary. They had two children together, but for the past two years, Lilly and the children had been living in Kinshasa while Willy earned enough money to join them and return to school.

On March 26, mission president William Maycock organized the first district in Luputa and called Willy to serve as its president. Willy felt unsure of himself, but he abandoned his plans to move and accepted the call. A short time later, Lilly and the children returned to Luputa, and Willy began his new responsibilities with them at his side.

See the full text in Gospel Library for notes and source citations.

Finding Heaven in the Temple

In June 2008, Willy and Lilly Binene caught a bus with their three children to the airport in Mbuji-Mayi, about a hundred miles north of their home in Luputa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. From there, they flew to Kinshasa, spent the night in the city, and then boarded a flight to South Africa. The trip was long, but the children were happy, enjoying their travels. The family was heading to the Johannesburg Temple to be sealed together for eternity.

Two years had passed since Willy’s call as president of the Luputa District had reunited them as a family. After moving back to Luputa, Lilly had opened a nursery school. It was an immediate success, and before long, she expanded it to a primary school. Willy had set aside his dream of becoming an electrical engineer to begin training as a nurse at the local hospital. He balanced this work with the demands of his calling, and he relied on the support of his counselors in the district presidency as they learned their new responsibilities, trained local leaders, and visited the Saints.

Recently, the presidency had taken on additional duties to help with a three-year, Church-funded project to pipe clean water into Luputa. The residents of the city had long depended on various pools, springs, and drainage ditches for water. Twice a day, women and children would walk a mile or more to one of these spots, collect water in whatever container they had on hand, and then carry it home. These water sources were teeming with dangerous parasites, and nearly everyone knew someone—often a small child—who had died from the contaminated water. And sometimes women were assaulted as they walked to and from the water source.

For many years, ADIR, a humanitarian organization in the DRC, had wanted to bring clean water to the 260,000 people in and around Luputa. But the best source for the water was a group of hillside springs twenty-one miles away, and ADIR did not have $2.6 million to build the pipeline. Then the organization’s managing director heard about Latter-day Saint Charities and contacted local humanitarian missionaries about collaborating on the project.

Created in 1996 under the direction of the First Presidency, Latter-day Saint Charities supported hundreds of Church humanitarian projects across the globe every year. Although its services varied according to need, its recent core initiatives were immunization, wheelchairs, vision care, infant care, and clean water. When word came about the need for a water pipeline to Luputa, Latter-day Saint Charities donated the necessary funds, and volunteers from Luputa and other nearby communities agreed to help provide the labor.

As a district presidency, Willy and his counselors worked with ADIR and Daniel Kazadi, a local Latter-day Saint hired as the site monitor. They also volunteered as laborers themselves.

Now, as the Binenes landed in Johannesburg, they could set aside their busy lives and focus on the house of the Lord. At the airport, they were greeted by a family and driven to the temple’s onsite patron housing. Later, Willy and Lilly entered the temple, dropped their children off at the Church-sponsored day care, and changed into white clothes.

Before leaving Luputa, the Binenes had studied the Church’s temple preparation manual, Endowed from on High, and read apostle James E. Talmage’s The House of the Lord. Still, when they got to the temple, they were a little disoriented because everything was new and no one spoke French. But by using gestures, they figured out where to go and what to do.

Later, in the sealing room, they were overjoyed to reunite with their three children. Dressed in white, they looked like angels as they came into the room. Willy felt goosebumps on his arms. He and his family no longer seemed to be on the earth. It was like they were in God’s presence.

“Wow,” he said.

Lilly too felt like they were in heaven. Knowing they were bound together for eternity seemed to multiply the family’s love for one another. They were inseparable now. Not even death could part them.

See the full text in Gospel Library for notes and source citations.

The Miracle of Clean Water

In September 2010, the residents of Luputa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, were nearly finished laying pipe for their Church-sponsored clean water pipeline. Speaking with a journalist, district president Willy Binene stressed the pipeline’s importance.

“Man can live without power,” he said. “But the lack of clean water is a burden almost too difficult to bear.”

Whether the reporter realized it or not, Willy was speaking from a lifetime of experience. As an electrical engineering student, he had never aspired to live in Luputa, a city without electricity. His plans had changed, and he’d managed fine—even thrived—without power. But he and his family, and every family in the area, had suffered the painful effects of waterborne diseases. To protect themselves at church, they had even sacrificed to purchase clean bottled water for the sacrament.

Now, with a little more work, life in Luputa was about to change. From the start of the project, every neighborhood in and around the city had been assigned days to work on the pipeline. On those days, trucks from ADIR, the organization managing the project, arrived in the neighborhood early to pick up volunteers and transport them to the worksite.

As the district president, Willy wanted to be a model leader. On the days his neighborhood was assigned to labor, he had set his nursing work aside and started digging. Between Luputa and the clean water source were miles of hills and valleys. Since the pipeline was powered by gravity, the volunteers had to dig the trench and bury pipe just right to make sure the water flowed properly.

Willy and the volunteers dug everything by hand. The trench had to be eighteen inches across and three feet deep. In some places, the ground was sandy, and the work went quickly. In other places, it was a snarl of tree roots and rocks, making for backbreaking work. Volunteers could only pray that brushfires and nests of biting insects did not slow their progress. On a good day, they could dig nearly five hundred feet of trench.

The Saints in the Luputa District worked special shifts in addition to their normal neighborhood assignments. On those days, the men of the Church joined the regular volunteers in digging the trench while women from the Relief Society prepared meals for the workers.

The Saints’ commitment to the project helped others learn more about their faith. People in the area saw the Church as an institution that looked out not only for its own members but also for the broader community.

When construction on the pipeline ended in November 2010, many people came to Luputa to witness the water’s arrival. Massive cisterns, perched atop high stilts, had been built in the city to store the water from the pipes. Yet some people wondered if the pipeline could really bring enough water to fill the tanks. Willy himself had his doubts.

Then the floodgates opened, and everyone could hear the roar of water pouring into the cisterns. Immense joy swept through the crowd. Dozens of small concrete water stations, each equipped with multiple spigots, could now dispense clean water throughout Luputa.

To mark the occasion, the city held a celebration. The festivities drew fifteen thousand people from Luputa and its neighboring villages. Among the honored guests were government and tribal dignitaries, ADIR officials, and a member of the Church’s Africa Southeast Area presidency. On one of the water tanks hung a large banner with bright blue letters:

As the guests arrived and took seats beneath specially constructed gazebos, a choir of young Latter-day Saints sang hymns.

Once everyone was in place, and the buzz of the crowd quieted down, Willy raised a microphone to his mouth and addressed the audience as a local representative of the Church. “Just as Jesus performed many miracles,” he said, “today it is a miracle that the water came to Luputa.” He told the crowd that the Church had sponsored the pipeline for the whole community, and he urged everyone to make good use of it.

And to anyone who wondered why the Church had taken such an interest in a place like Luputa, he gave a simple reply.

“We are all children of our Heavenly Father,” he said. “We must do good to everyone.”

See the full text in Gospel Library for notes and source citations.

Rejoicing Together in Luputa

On October 2, 2011, a gasoline-powered generator coughed to life at the Luputa meetinghouse in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Inside, around two hundred Saints—including Willy and Lilly Binene—were finding seats in front of a television set in the chapel. In a few moments, a Sunday night broadcast of the Church’s 181st Semiannual General Conference would begin, translated into French—one of fifty-one languages in which conference was available to Saints around the world. It was the first general conference the Church members in Luputa would enjoy as members of a stake in Zion.

The organization of the Luputa Stake three months earlier had come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the Church’s rapid growth in the city. In 2008, the same year the Binene family was sealed in the temple, over twelve hundred Latter-day Saints lived in Luputa. At that time, there were no full-time missionaries serving there. Yet over the next three years, Willy and other Church leaders had worked with faithful branch missionaries to more than double the number of Saints in their district—an effort doubtless aided by the Church’s role in bringing clean water to the city. The district had even sent out thirty-four full-time missionaries to serve in other parts of the DRC, Africa, and the world.

Still, Willy had been surprised when Elder Paul E. Koelliker and Elder Alfred Kyungu of the Seventy called him to be president of the new stake. The Church in Luputa had several experienced priesthood leaders, each of whom could serve capably as a stake president. Wasn’t it someone else’s turn to lead?

On June 26, the day the stake was organized, Willy helped Elder Koelliker and Elder Kyungu distribute full-time mission calls to fifteen young women and men in the stake. Afterward, Willy smiled as he posed for a photograph with the group. Two decades earlier, ethnic strife and bloodshed had driven him from his home, robbing him of a chance to serve his own full-time mission for the Lord. Yet his years of devoted Church service in Luputa had helped give the rising generation of Saints opportunities he did not have.

As the conference broadcast began, Willy settled back to listen to the speakers. Normally President Monson was the first speaker at the opening session of conference, but a health problem had delayed his coming to the Conference Center. After the intermediate hymn, however, he approached the pulpit and welcomed the Saints to conference with a cheerful “hello.”

“When we’re busy, time seems to pass far too quickly,” he said, “and the past six months have been no exception for me.”

President Monson spoke of the dedication of the temple in El Salvador as well as the rededication of the temple in Atlanta in the southern United States. “The building of temples continues uninterrupted, brothers and sisters,” he said. “Today it is my privilege to announce several new temples.”

Willy listened carefully. Lately, temples had been on the minds of Church leaders in Luputa. In fact, at the first stake conference in the city, many of the talks had centered on preparing the Saints to attend the house of the Lord. Aside from the Binenes, only a few Saints in Luputa had been able to go to the Johannesburg Temple. While passports were relatively easy to acquire in the DRC, travel visas to South Africa were not. This meant that many Saints in the DRC were stuck waiting, worrying that their passports would expire before they could receive a visa and attend the temple.

The first temple President Monson announced was the second for the city of Provo, Utah. Recently, the city’s historic tabernacle had accidentally caught fire, and flames had consumed almost everything except its exterior walls. Now the Church planned to rebuild and repurpose it as a house of the Lord.

“I am also pleased to announce new temples in the following locations,” President Monson continued. “Barranquilla, Colombia; Durban, South Africa; Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and—”

As soon as they heard “Kinshasa,” Willy and everyone around him stood and cheered. The news had taken them completely by surprise. Soon, Congolese Saints would not have to worry about travel visas or expiring passports. The prophet’s simple announcement had changed everything.

There had been no rumors, no hints that the Church had plans to build a temple in the DRC. There had only been hope—hope that one day the Lord would establish His house in their land.

Now it was happening! It was finally happening!

See the full text in Gospel Library for notes and source citations.

Leave Time Up to God

On May 28, 2017, Willy Binene stood to bear his testimony at his ward meetinghouse in Luputa. It was his family’s last Sunday there—at least for a while. He and Lilly had recently received a call from the First Presidency to serve as the leaders of the Côte d’Ivoire Abidjan Mission, on the western coast of Africa. Having missed his chance to serve a full-time mission as a young man, Willy had always hoped to one day serve a mission alongside Lilly. But neither of them had expected the call to come so soon.

A year earlier, Elder Neil L. Andersen of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles had come to the DRC to break ground for the temple in Kinshasa. During the trip, he and his wife, Kathy, traveled to Mbuji-Mayi, a city some ninety miles north of Luputa, to meet with the Saints in the area. Willy met Elder Andersen and shared his story with him.

Several months after Elder Andersen’s visit, the apostle surprised Willy and Lilly with a video call. He told them the Lord had another assignment for them and asked some questions about their life and work responsibilities. He then asked Lilly, “Would you agree to leave your country to go and serve the Lord elsewhere?”

“Yes,” Lilly told him. “We are willing.”

About a week later, President Dieter F. Uchtdorf extended the call to serve as mission leaders. They received it with a mix of joy and fear. Both felt unsure if they could measure up to their new responsibilities. But it was not the first time the Lord had asked them to do something hard, and they were willing to commit themselves wholly to His service.

“If it is God who called us,” Lilly thought, “He alone will manifest Himself and qualify us for the work.”

Their four children—aged five to sixteen—took the news well. The Saints in Luputa, however, could not hide the sadness on their faces when Willy and Lilly’s call was announced. For over two decades, Willy had helped the Church blossom in Luputa, growing from a small group of displaced believers to a thriving stake of Zion. The Saints did not simply think of him as their former district and stake president. The restored gospel had taught them to see each other as brothers and sisters, so Willy, Lilly, and the Binene children were their family.

As Willy bore his testimony to ward members, he felt immense love for them. Yet his eyes remained dry—even as Lilly, the choir members, and everyone else around him wept. Few things in his life had gone as expected. It seemed every time he had made a plan—for school, for a full-time mission, for work—something happened, sending him off in another direction. But looking back on his life, he could see the Lord had always had a plan for him.

After the meeting, Willy’s emotions finally overwhelmed him, and tears poured from his eyes. He did not think that he had ever done anything special. In fact, he felt a bit inconsequential, like a drop in the ocean. But he knew the Lord was guiding him, urging him along as the plan became clearer and more defined.

At their house, he, Lilly, and the children said goodbye to their friends. The family then climbed into a car waiting to take them to their next field of service.

“You can never be in a hurry,” Willy realized. “Leave time up to God.”

See the full text in Gospel Library for notes and source citations.