Turning pain to power – Women of DRC

When we hear/read about the Congo (DRC), it is usually terrible stories, particularly those involving women. My own blog entries are no different. But recently there is a sense that things are shifting a bit – women are taking things into their own hands and among all the pain and devastation, there are shoots of hope.

• There is City of Joy in Bukavu, a place conceived and created by women to provide women survivors of sexual violence “a place to heal emotionally as they rebuild their lives, turn their pain to power, and return back into their communities to lead.” City of Joy will provide group therapy, self-defense, theatre, HIV/AIDS and family planning, horticulture and economic empowerment to up to 180 women a year. It is a project of V-Day and UNICEF, in partnership with Panzi Foundation. To find out more, watch this short, powerful video.

• Another source of hope is the Heal My People programme at HEAL Africa, a Congolese relief organization centered in Goma. The programme was launched by Jeanne Muliri Kabekaty, known as “Mama Muliri” to her friends and colleagues, and its aim is to turn women from victims into survivors and eventually into strong women of the community and the hope of the future of Congo.

In this interview below, Mama Muliri explains what this means. (The interview was translated by HEAL’s Executive Director Judy Anderson and posted on the PeaceXPeace network. (To listen to the whole interview, click here.)

“Let me tell you about the work we are doing with women who had real pain, real sorrow. You know the stories of what had happened to women but what we were really concerned about is that they not live with the stories of their past as victims of sexual violence.

When we first started they were victims but then we said they’re no longer victims because these women that we have been working with have been cared for medically, their emotional state has improved. We started thinking: what other words can we use? We started calling them survivors. We thought: survivors, well yeah they are survivors but how long are they going to be survivors? How many years can they live as survivors? Where does that leave them? We need to give them a way to show how strong they can be and we want them to think of themselves as strong within the community. We want to also change the name.

How will that name change? They need to be strong enough to do hard work. It also has to be work that they can do well and that they can see the value of and the worth of. We work with women and then when they return home we put them with the other women in the communities so that they are all strong together. The women that come back have strength that is accepted and valued in the community and they can work together for their own futures. They can do handiwork, they can work in the gardens, they can sell small items in markets. They find a way to see themselves again as a woman, like the other women in the community.

These women also learn how to accept each other and welcome each other. The women that had a terrible experience during the war are no longer pointed out with the finger, “See that one.” The women that we have worked with, that we have helped heal are now with their other women in community. They are working together.

So we have buried the word victim. We have buried the word survivor. Now these women are called the strong women of the community. They are the hope for the future of Congo. These women have buried their pasts and they are going into the future. What we see is that if in the next two or three years we have no more wars Congo will have a whole different look. And that is why we women are standing together to say: NO MORE WAR. If somebody comes to us proposing another war for another reason we will stand together and say: No More. Enough is enough."

The World Most Dangerous Place for Women – Sexual terrorism in the DRC

I’ve watched “The World’s Most Dangerous Place for Women” a couple of days ago and cannot shake it from my mind. It left me deeply moved and unsettled. In this powerful BBC3 documentary, we follow 23-year-old Judith Wanga, who grew up in London as she returns to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she was born. Two decades after she was sent to Britain by her parents, she's returning to Congo to meet them for the first time.

She wants to understand the childhood she missed and the country she was forced to leave. After reuniting with her parents in the capital, Kinshasa, Jude heads east to Kivu, an area of the country that's been devastated by war.

It is the most dangerous place in the world to be a woman, where rape has become a weapon of war – rape with the intent of totally destroying women and through them their families and communities. Jude meets survivors - women and children - as well as perpetrators, and finds out what is partially driving this brutality - the precious minerals that make our mobile phones and laptops work.

We follow Jude as she is trying to make sense of the often blurred line between perpetrators and victims and the awesome beauty of the landscape and the horrors it holds. In a war that has already claimed over 4 million people, women of all ages continue to be the victims of sexual terrorism. “Mass rape. It was like a virus,” writes documentary director Fiona Lloyd-Davies in a blog post on her film.

“In Shabunda, a town deep in the forest, I found that nearly 70% of the women had been raped. Since then I'd gone back to DRC on and off over half a dozen times to write articles and make short films. But I'd never been able to secure a commission to make a whole film about what was happening to these women. It was as though they had been forgotten by the world. The women had totally captured my heart. I felt I couldn't let them down.

The sexual violence has now become generational. Women are being raped for the third or fourth time, and their children who they conceived through rape, are themselves being raped too.”

In most cases, women who have been raped are rejected by their husbands, families and communities because they bring shame and because of fear of HIV and other diseases. There is also the huge question of what is going to happen to all the children born as a result of rape…

In this terrible place, Jude also meet some amazing women, like 24-year-old Delphine, a final year law student who is going out to villages to record survivors' testimonies; Merveille a teenage former child soldier; Masika a survivor who has set up her own support network for other women, and Christine Schuler Descriver, a human right activist and director of V-Day Bukavu. V-Day is a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. It acts as a catalyst that promotes creative events to increase awareness, raise money and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations.

V-Day at Royal Albert Hall - Stop Sexual Violence in DRC

Today, 19th November 2009, hundreds of men and women – activists, politicians from all parties, journalists, celebrities and religious leaders – are gathering on the steps of the Royal Albert Hall in London to demonstrate against the use of sexual violence in the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The event is organized by V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls.

Exactly one hundred years ago, the Great Congo Demonstration was held at the Royal Albert Hall, chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury and joined by artists and intellectuals, such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain, to campaign against the exploitation, slavery and murder of the Congolese people.

One hundred years on, violence and exploitation of a different but equivalent devastation remains. Over the last 12 years, the ongoing conflict has claimed the lives of an estimated 6 million people and sexual violence in the DRC is being used to torture and humiliate women and girls and destroy families.

V-Day Founder/Playwright Eve Ensler, who has travelled to the Congo five times in the last two years stated: “What we are seeing in the DRC is a war being enacted on the bodies of women that is conscious and intentional - it is the systematic destruction of the female population of the Congo. Today, we are hearing reports from activists on the ground that the babies born of rape are NOW being raped. What this tells us is that this vicious cycle is continuing, that we are fighting for the same human rights today that the protesters at The Great Congo Demonstration fought for 100 years ago.”

Hundreds of thousands of women and girls have been raped since the conflict began. In addition to the severe psychological impact, sexual violence leaves many survivors with genital lesions, traumatic fistulae, severed and broken limbs, unwanted pregnancies, and sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV. Survivors are regularly ostracised and abandoned by their families and communities.

V-Day UK Committee calls upon the international community to champion:

*A political – not military – solution to end the devastating, incessant conflict in the Congo.
*For prosecutions to be taken against those who are living in impunity for the sexual crimes they inflict daily upon Congolese women and girls.
*Support for a larger women’s police force in the Congo that can bring reliable security and protection to the most vulnerable members of its society.

This event is the first in a series that make up Congo Now - an international campaign that unites a coalition of more than 20 of the UK’s biggest NGOs plus UK parliamentarians. The campaign combines British and Congolese voices to demand an end to the world's worst humanitarian crisis - and action to address its underlying causes and consequences. The campaign will reach a climax in June and July 2010, when the DRC celebrates 50 years of independence.