KEY POINTS:
When you unfold a map of Africa, the first country your eye is drawn to is the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The size of Western Europe, DRC holds court in the centre of this vast continent, nestled by nine other countries.
It appears to be Africa's nucleus,
its troubled heart. Until recently, the country conjured up only mysterious and amorphous images of darkness in my mind. After making my first trip to the eastern province of North Kivu this past October with aid agency Oxfam International, I discovered something more complex.
The trip was brief. But what I learned on that two-day sojourn into camps for internally displaced people (IDPs), with the goal of putting faces to the mind-boggling statistics of war, has left a lasting mark.
The people of eastern DRC are suffering one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. Since 1996, the country has been pummelled by a series of brutal wars. The fighting has led to appalling levels of hunger, disease and death - and countless human rights abuses.
Most of the people affected by the hostilities don't have adequate food or services even though DRC is one of the most-resource rich countries in the world. Instead, they live in regions rife with militias, rebels and undisciplined soldiers - some who looked barely old enough to ride a bicycle - and face the prospect of death on a daily basis.
In sum, the lives of an incomprehensible number of people in eastern DRC have been systematically darkened by war and, in 4 million of those cases, extinguished altogether.
There are 800,000 IDPs who, forced to flee their home villages because of armed attacks and fighting between government troops and rebels, are crammed into camps in North Kivu Province. Half of these IDPs have fled their villages in the last year alone.
The camps and settlements I saw reminded me of the make-believe scenes from the movie-sets or video shoots that are part of my every day life 4828 kilometres away in Los Angeles where I work as an entertainment photographer and director.
But this was not make believe. It is stark reality for thousands who have lost everything, from clothing and their homes to mothers and daughters. The situation is so severe the real number of IDPs in the country's eastern flank is impossible to tally - countless people are cut off from the world due to the lack of security.
Yet astonishingly, perhaps impossibly, I detected a distant but determined flicker of light in eastern DRC.
It is the light of hope for a more peaceful future, defying the unimaginable misery of the present. I could make it out in the smiles of children, even though they had little food to eat, never mind toys to play with.
I glimpsed it in women like Jeannette, who I met in the Bulengo IDP camp outside the provincial capital city of Goma, who get up every morning and tend their families weeks after loved ones are lost or killed in attacks by armed groups. I found it in the men who generously showed me around the squalid camps they now live in after being forced to flee their home villages with their families.
And I saw it in the presence of UN peacekeepers, known as MONUC, who patrol the war-torn landscape protecting civilians where they can, although the conflict still rages unabated in many areas. On the short ride back from the IDP camps to Goma, it occurred to me that I had only scratched the surface of the conflict in DRC.
I was gripped by a determination to return soon and bring home more photographs exposing a humanitarian crisis that my fellow countrymen cannot begin to comprehend. When I do return, I hope the situation will have improved. However, despite the courageous work being carried out by aid workers, journalists and peacekeepers, and the extraordinary resilience of the Congolese people, I am unsure that this will be a reality soon.
But then, like now, all I can do is take photographs and hope that policymakers and politicians, many of whom are half way around the world, might see them and do everything in their power to bring a bit of light back into their lives and future.
