DAVID GREENE, HOST:
This next story is about learning to fight to heal the scars of war. We're going to a part of the world that's known nothing but conflict for two decades, eastern Congo.
NPR's Gregory Warner found a spot in the city of Goma, where what's flying aren't grenades and bullets, but jabs and uppercuts.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS)
GREGORY WARNER, BYLINE: At six in the morning, even the streets of Goma have a sense of peace about them. Music spills from the store front churches and the normally terrifying motorcycle taxis give you a discounted first customer fare.
(SOUNDBITE OF WHIRRING)
WARNER: And 6 A.M. is the time that a group of young men, that call themselves the Friendship Club, gather in a concrete notch of an open-air soccer stadium to train. Lacking ropes or a ring, or in some cases sneakers, the men exchange jabs while their trainer and coach Kibomango looks on with a serene smile.
KIBOMANGO: Let's start again. I feel at ease when I see them practicing.
(Through Translator) Considering what we passed through, when I see young people practicing like this, it pleases me a lot.
WARNER: Thirty-five--year-old Kibumango is blind in his left eye from a bomb blast, which must be strange for his opponents because he boxes southpaw. The eye you see when he comes at you is shriveled, sunken, an old man's eye on a powerful body.
KIBOMANGO: It doesn't matter having one eye, because I'm used to fighting since my youth.
WARNER: Kibumango's whole childhood was a series of battles. First as a street boy fighting for food and turf, and then as a child soldier in the rebel army that brought the now-rulers of Congo to power. Today, the young men he coaches are 19, 20 years old, but already veterans, snatched up by militia groups to fight at age 10 or 12. Kibumango teaches them boxing as well as auto mechanics, with help from a local NGO called the Kivu Assistance and Reintegration Centre. It was started by Congolese peace activists.
KEDRIQUE MOKE: (Foreign language spoken)
WARNER: 19 year old Kedrique Moke boxes under the name Tyson.
MOKE: Yeah, I am very Tyson. I'm very, very good Tyson. I'm a champion of most of Congo.
WARNER: Is it like you fight like Tyson?
MOKE: Yah.
WARNER: Tyson was 10 years old when he was conscripted into the Union of Congolese Patriots - a rebel militia notorious for ethnic massacres, tortures and rapes.
MOKE: (Foreign language spoken)
WARNER: He says he doesn't remember very much.
MOKE: (Through Translator) What is true, we were given a sort of water which was spirit water. It changes your mind and whatever thing you do you don't know it. So if we killed, we killed, but we were not under control of ourselves.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: One, one, two, two, three, three, four, four...
WARNER: It might seem odd that teaching former killers the art of fighting could help them become better citizens or deal with their PTSD. But Kibomango says boxing and fighting are as different as sports and war. Raw brutality doesn't win matches. You have to pay attention and stay in control, not the way he recalls himself as a child soldier, lost in space.
KIBOMANGO: So when I say being in the space, it means that I wasn't really responsible for myself. I was someone that ready to be sent wherever. Go here, I go. Do this, I do. That's why I say that it was if I was in the space.
WARNER: Just three years ago, the one-eyed Kibomango rose up to become welterweight champion of his province. And this month, he and some of his trainees were going to the nationals. That is, until November, when a rebel group called M23 took over the city of Goma. The governor fled and took with him the money that the boxers were supposed to use to fly to the championship in Kinshasa.
So now, each night on TV, Kibomango watches other boxers fight his bouts. And instead of dealing with sports agents, he's dealing with a different kind of local recruiter.
KIBOMANGO: We are targeted. They would like to catch us again to put us in the army.
WARNER: The M23 rebels, though officially retreated from the city, still lurk around training sessions in civilian clothes.
KIBOMANGO: They say it's good there, things are going to be good. We're going to be mechanics, boxing there.
WARNER: They tell them - wait - you'll be able to be a mechanic and a boxer in the M23?
KIBOMANGO: (Through Translator) Yes and receive salaries. That's what they said.
FABRICE DJEF: (Foreign language spoken)
WARNER: As when talking, a young boxer, Fabrice Djef, interrupts. We are sons of Congo, he tells me. We'd die before we fought for M23 against our country.
But Kibomango says he's already lost two boxers to the M23. And he's not so quick to label his former trainees as traitors.
KIBOMANGO: So yes, they are being recruited. Even me, if it continues like this - because there's no other way of surviving without being a soldier - I can even go again to the army.
WARNER: Even if that means giving up boxing and going back to the fighting life.
Gregory Warner, NPR News, Nairobi.