SAKPA, Central African Republic — CRS facilitator Anatole Maïtovo asks the workshop participants to close their eyes and bow their heads.

Now, picture the future you see for yourself and your neighbors, he says. What does your community look like in five years?

Sakpa residents participate in a “dream exercise,” picturing in their minds the community they hoped to live in five years. Photo by Loïc Hostetter for Catholic Relief Services.

“I dreamt of a miracle,” said a local teacher, displaced from Kilometre Cinq, a now Muslim-majority neighborhood in the capital, Bangui.

She saw herself at school, surrounded by the neighbors who chased her from her home during the crisis. Now they asked for her return, and promised to help her rebuild her life in Kilometre Cinq.

A father stood and said he saw his children playing outside again, passing a ball in front of the house. For the first time in years, he didn’t worry about their safety.

A few minutes later, an elderly man on the far side of the room spoke up.

His wish: that Sakpa’s residents, and their fellow Central Africans, would dispel memories of violence and mistrust from their thoughts and their hearts.

No more “cemetery hearts,” he said.