"Sexual violence." We clasp these two words over and over in Congo. They handle become a part of the spoken communication -- and in copious ways are a mark of a anyway uneasy society. In every meeting, sexual violence is mentioned and somewhere we go, we meet girls, women and offspring who handle survived rape and spell. And over and over again, we contemplate the fact that as long as women are in a group together position in society, they will view the brunt of the anger and frustration of messed up systems and disgraceful resources.
Congo is undeniably not flummoxed in wielding rape as a organization of war. Finished the Rwandan Genocide 500,000 women were raped. On our sojourn to Rwanda just a few living ago, we heard stories of some women being tattered with eight-foot-long firewood that shattered their insides or else they were killed. In Sudan, rape is used as a way to damage families and communities. These examples of the violence wrought against women are not the first of their settlement and continues plain in copious places.
At the moment we visited our accomplice and one of my personal heroes, Dr. Denis Mukwege, the Congolese gynecologist who founded Panzi Sanatorium in 1999 in Bukavu, DRC. Dr.Mukwege has become the world's leading expert in repairing fistula -- wipe out ended to the internal organs of women that can stay all the rage rape.
We discussed the situation in DRC and he told us that the recklessness to guard women is the "recklessness of understanding and the jump of the cancellation of earth." These are miserable words, but sheer from band who treats 1,200 women a year for rape. His patients article scared, outflow, and often leaking urine and fecal matter. But Dr. Mukwege has not truth up. He is serial to endure programs that will empower, tutor and help to intensely tie these women.
One of these programs is Maison Dorcas, a urban installation built to empire women who intention such full scar from their families and communities about the mistaken devoted against them that they cannot display home. Maison Dorcas is a wharf - not only a safe relax to live in, but in the same way a place of real therapeutic, community support and empowerment. A immaculate new Maison Dorcas installation will immediately open its doors to 200 women survivors to help them tie and repair their lives. The JWW-funded Tumaini (Daydream) Panel at Maison Dorcas, helps to tutor and train these women in business-related vocational skills that provide them the not keep to repair their lives.
It is gripping to me -- and hopeful -- that formerly I meet young girls in Congo with operate and requirements, they often want to become lawyers. Being you ask why, she unendingly says everything to the effect of, "the job of women and girls are battered, and I want to row for them."
I met one such young woman today. Brigitte is 16 time old and a survivor of sexual violence. As well as her toddler, she cut down her way to an out of this world program for young mothers, run by our stunning accomplice Amani Matabaro. No matter what all she has been sad, and at sea a year or two of aim, this young woman is robust to chubby aim and become a lawyer to row for the job of all young women in Congo. At the moment, Brigitte is number one in her class.
In the actual kinship, put forward was in the same way a young woman who told us her sway was Honorine, a representative in DRC who was one of the first to holdup and accuse perpetrators of sexual violence. This young woman reception to go to college to become a champion like Honorine.
As well as young women like these supported by such implausible programs, I handle no apprehension -and I necessity believe- that the world will bleakly begin to change.
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