An Eclectic man is hard at work from his new home here in the small Elmore County town helping build a village some 12,000 miles away amid what was once nothing but bush in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Sebastien Kalinde, who recently relocated in Eclectic from Fube – the village in the Congo he is helping to plan and the first planned Congolese community – with his daughter, Joya, now a sophomore at Elmore County High School, is originally from the Congo, which he fled amid civil war and other unrest in the country that began in August 1998 with what is often called the Second Congo War or the Great War of Africa.