Inside a cavernous warehouse at an airport in eastern Congo, Dr. Phil Dirksen, his wife and two young children watched helplessly as customs officials ripped open their luggage and scattered their belongings.

When they tried to return the doctor's bronchoscope to its case, the officers crushed it.

They did not know the doctor and his family had arrived that July in 1981 to help the people of Congo – then known as Zaire. They could not know that for the next three decades, Dirksen would treat hundreds of rape victims, train hundreds of local doctors and thousands of nurses.

And back then, those customs officials did not know they themselves would become Dirksen's patients.

Now, they wait eagerly to welcome the 64-year-old doctor and his 62-year-old wife, Zana, when they arrive for their annual trips to work in Congo's hospitals.

Congolese call the jovial doctor with snowy hair, thick mustache and a roaring laugh "Muganga (Doctor) Philippe" and "Le Maitre (The Teacher)." His soft-spoken wife is "Madame Zana."

"Oh, it's the red carpet treatment now," Dirksen said jokingly last week, sitting in an examination room at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, Sacramento, where he works as a general surgeon.

His office was cramped with stacks of boxes of syringes, gloves and other medical equipment marked for shipment to Congo.

The son of lay missionaries who worked with Hopi Indians in Arizona, Dirksen said he knew at age 15 he wanted to become a medical missionary.

"I enjoyed the sciences and am empathetic," Dirksen said.

"You are just an all-around nice person," his wife teased. Zana Dirksen said she, too, decided at age 15 to lead a missionary life.

When they're in Congo, she helps out at the hospitals, volunteers at a center that caters to orphaned children and teaches English.

"God gives me two great gifts," Dirksen said. "One is my wife, and the other my hands."

"They have a great compassion, an enormous faith and an enormous love for Christ," added Dann Bryant, an associate pastor of Arcade Church, where the Dirksens are longtime members. "That love compels them to love others even at the risk of their own safety."

Dirksen and his wife said they are planning to return next spring to Congo, despite renewed fighting that has intensified since August. Rebels have overtaken large swaths of North Kivu province, where the Dirksens have worked.

On a trip this spring, the couple could not travel to one hospital in Rwanguba, a rural area that had been their home for 10 of their years in Congo. That area now is occupied by rebels.

"That's the house where we raised our kids," said Zana Dirksen, pointing to a brick building nestled on slopes of a lush, terraced hillside inside a framed photograph hanging in her husband's office.

The couple is apprehensive about the fate of hospital workers they've not heard from for two months.

"It's all home to us, they are like our extended family," Dirksen said.

A doctor in Congo told him the previous Saturday that people in Goma and its surrounding areas are starving. They are too fearful to leave their homes to work the fields.

"The people are desperate," Zana Dirksen said.

Congo is a vast, mineral-rich country in the heart of Africa, but it has suffered years of civil war atrocities. In the past two months, the conflict has killed at least 100 civilians and displaced 250,000.

The Dirksens fear the fighting will leave more women victimized by the kind of sexual violence that has already damaged hundreds of thousands of lives.

In recent years, a growing stream of women have arrived at the hospital in Goma, the regional capital where Dirksen has worked, with severe physical and mental wounds from gang rapes. Some of them walked miles in tattered clothes to reach the hospital, Dirksen said.

"What comes to mind is their resilience," Dirksen said.

"The rapes ... it's so barbaric and inhuman," Zana Dirksen added. "These women. They are amazing. They heal ... and they go about their lives."

Friends ask why the Dirksens return to the turmoil year after year.

"We always plan to go back, until we can't," she said.

Call The Bee's Chelsea Phua, (916) 321-1132.