Letter from Libenge / Paul Cullen: Just a few years after it was last looted, Libenge's school is facing a new invasion, this time from the vines and tendrils of the tropical jungle that threaten to strangle its handsome redbricked façade for good.
This week, however, the thrust of nature and the misdeeds of man will be reversed when work starts on rebuilding the school in time for the next academic year.
It's one small vote of confidence in the future of the this part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country plundered for centuries by successive waves of colonists, neighbours and home-grown rulers.
You don't have to stray far from Libenge, a small waystation on the Oubangui river founded by Catholic missionaries and Belgian rubber-buyers, to find evidence of this sordid history. Not far from here, Roger Casement uncovered the exploitation and terror underpinning the Belgian Free State. His reports from 1904 detailed cases of natives being forced to drink white men's urine, having their hands beaten until they dropped off, being eaten by maggots while still alive and fed to cannibal tribes on death.
Further up the river is Gbadolite, where the dictator Joseph Mobutu built three palaces and an airstrip long enough to land a Concorde. In his home town, he also erected a vast mausoleum made with Italian marble, stocked a private zoo with antelope and giraffe and imported 500 Argentine sheep for a model farm. His wine cellar held 15,000 bottles and consumption of champagne ran to 12,000 bottles a year.
All this is gone now, of course, as is the Big Man with the Buddy Holly glasses and the leopardskin hat. Yet the end of Mobutu saw the Congo's fortunes get worse rather than better. Two civil wars ensued, involving virtually all its neighbours, and estimates put the number of dead from fighting, hunger and malnutrition at almost four million.
The war in the Congo, the most bloody the world has seen since the second World War, has been largely ignored in the West. It is a complex conflict, involving a dizzying number of rebel groups and private armies, yet not half as complex as some would have you believe.
There are two simple keys to understanding what is going on. The first is, in the words of one officer from Monuc, the UN peacekeeping force, "everyone is at some time or another fighting everyone else". Allies fall out, change sides and fight each other, then make up again with monotonous regularity. Politics and ideology count for little with these armies; self-interest is all.
Second, Congo's neighbours see the country's mineral resources as there - and theirs - for the taking. This is a weak state, vast in size and virtually ungovernable. It has no transport infrastructure worth talking about, and 10,000 phone lines for 60 million people. To its better-equipped neighbours, it is a large, ungainly but very plump sitting duck.
Rwanda and Uganda, for example, sent their troops into the east of DR Congo in order to gain access to the country's vast mineral wealth. Revenues from diamonds and gold, silver and coltan paid for their super-inflated armies and kept their soldiers from getting up to mischief at home. In the face of international pressure, both countries eventually signed up to the peace process, but their proxy armies are still at large.
Libenge itself was looted three times. A gunboat shelled the town repeatedly until it took a direct hit; its rusting hulk lies marooned in the Oubangui to this day.
After the first attacks, the locals tried to repair the damage; when it happened again, there no longer seemed to be a point. Most fled across the borders, to the Republic of Congo or the Central African Republic.
"I didn't see anything but I heard the gunfire and ran," one woman told me. "We hid in the forest, then crossed the river by night. Neighbours came and told us there had been much killing."
That she has returned is testament to the relative stability of this part of Congo since a peace treaty was agreed in 2002. It's two years now since Monuc was withdrawn and moved to more troubled areas in the east.
The return of thousands of refugees is not the only positive sign for Congo's future. The country is now the focus of a vast experiment in conflict resolution, involving power-sharing, retraining for the army and police and the assimilation of former rebel fighters into unified army battalions.
It's early days yet, but the programme can claim some successes. Rebel groups in the northeastern province of Ituri, near Uganda, have been quelled, although the two Kivu provinces, bordering Rwanda, remain troublesome.
When the police opened fire on demonstrators in the capital, Kinshasa, last week, they did so with CS gas supplied by France rather than live bullets. Well, most of them did, because at least one person was shot.
In advance of elections planned for next year, 130,000 people a day have been registering to vote. After 45 years, the country's first democratic constitution has just been introduced.
The international effort is impressive. Monuc, at 17,000 strong, is the largest UN force in the world (and includes three Irish army officers). It costs $1.3 billion a year to run, and its air fleet is growing so fast it will shortly be the largest in Africa.
Much will depend on the conduct and outcome of the elections, which promise to be one of the most unusual, complex and expensive exercises in democracy ever seen.