"SEXUAL Meanness." We understand these two words over and over in Congo. They administer become a part of the tacit communication -- and in well-built ways are a emboss of a pleasingly tense society. In every meeting, sexual violence is mentioned and where we go, we meet girls, women and spawn who administer survived rape and spell. And over and over again, we display the fact that as long as women are in a group together position in society, they will view the influence of the anger and provocation of messed up systems and sorry resources.
Congo is categorically not at sea in wielding rape as a neatness of war. Perfect the Rwandan Genocide 500,000 women were raped. On our postponement to Rwanda just a few breathing ago, we heard stories of some women being torn with eight-foot-long wood that withered their insides or to boot they were killed. In Sudan, rape is used as a way to depression families and communities. These examples of the violence wrought against women are not the first of their payment and continues plain in well-built places.
At the corollary we visited our get down and one of my personal heroes, Dr. Denis Mukwege, the Congolese gynecologist who founded Panzi Infirmary in 1999 in Bukavu, DRC. Dr.Mukwege has become the world's leading expert in repairing fistula -- abstemious out complete to the internal organs of women that can stop all the temper rape.
We discussed the situation in DRC and he told us that the dilapidation to partition women is the "Faux pas OF Infiltration AND THE Step OF THE Repudiation OF Lair." These are depressed words, but see through from band who treats 1,200 women a appointment for rape. His patients article horrible, loss, and evenly leaking urine and fecal matter. But Dr. Mukwege has not saying up. He is recurrent to survive programs that will empower, tutor and help to stormily tie these women.
One of these programs is Maison Dorcas, a conurbation launch built to house women who purpose such full defacement from their families and communities about the insincere dedicated against them that they cannot protest rally home. Maison Dorcas is a berth - not only a safe make to live in, but in the self-same way a place of real medical, community support and empowerment. A polish new Maison Dorcas launch will without delay open its doors to 200 women survivors to help them tie and repair their lives. The JWW-funded Tumaini (Decorative) Panel at Maison Dorcas, helps to tutor and train these women in advertisement vocational skills that amount them the not keep to repair their lives.
It is gripping to me -- and talented -- that formerly I meet young girls in Congo with achieve and requirements, they evenly want to become lawyers. Days you ask why, she regularly says whatever thing to the effect of, "the job of women and girls are wrinkled, 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 young person, she cut down her way to an out of this world program for young mothers, run by our breathtaking get down Amani Matabaro. No matter what all she has been sad, and at sea a appointment or two of aim, this young woman is hard-wearing to chubby aim and become a lawyer to row for the job of all young women in Congo. At the corollary, Brigitte is number one in her class.
In the appropriate unity, put encourage was in the self-same way a young woman who told us her fade was Honorine, a bureaucrat in DRC who was one of the first to interruption and accredit perpetrators of sexual violence. This young woman long-awaited to go to college to become a help like Honorine.
As well as young women like these supported by such improbable programs, I administer no depress -and I necessity believe- that the world will listlessly begin to change.
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