The women of Kitchanga keep arriving to the camps on the outskirts of Goma, DRC. They have had to flee their homes as their town of Kitchanga was caught up in violence and fighting between armed groups earlier in March.
But their long journey to safety–a week by foot, through fields and forest–is anything but safe. Often they have a hard choice to make.
It’s either “kill me” or “do what you want just, please, don’t kill me”. A gentle, quiet spoken, 30-year-old Marie chose the latter.
One day, at dusk, not long before reaching the Lac Vert camp, she and the group of women she was with found themselves surrounded by armed men. “As soon as we saw them, we knew what would happen,” she says.
It is either die or accept your fate. For women in DRC, “fate” often equals rape. In the forest, at dusk, in front of their children, Marie and all the other women were raped.
Now they are in the Lac Vert camp. Marie is with her four-month-old baby. She doesn’t know where her husband is; they lost sight of each other when they fled. He doesn’t know what has happened to her, and Marie worries about how he is going to react once he does.
The house for mothers
For now, in her brown, thorn dress she is waiting to be seen by a psycho-social agent in the “house for mothers”, as the tent receiving survivors of sexual violence is known.
She arrived at the camp a week ago, and has been in pain and ashamed ever since. “Everything hurts,” she says. She points to her abdomen, back, neck. Then she touches her head. “And here too,” she say. “Headache…I can’t sleep. What happened has been keeping me awake.”
The day before we speak, she heard about the house for mothers from one of the educators, and she mustered up enough courage to come and seek help. Here, she will receive emotional support and referral to get medical care in the health centre near the camp.
But even before that, first, the women have to know that such a house exists and they should seek out help. This is where educators trained by CARE and its partners play a crucial role. They talk to the survivors and encourage them to reach out.
“I will tell the other women to do the same, to come here,” says Marie. “Many are ashamed and don’t want to admit to what has happened to them.”
The men who commit these horrific acts are never punished, she continues. “How can they be? They appear from nowhere, and disappear into nowhere. Who is going to find them?” she asks with a sense of hopelessness, resignation.
Her only hope is that when, if the war stops, life will be better. “Tell people to help us so that this stops, and we can go back to our homes,” she says suddenly, a trembling plea in her voice.
As new arrivals, life is even more difficult for them than for the rest of the displaced population who is seeking shelter in the camp. They have no shelter, no tents. They are forced to live in the open space of the camp, cook on the rocks from whatever they can scrape together or helpful neighbours give them. Their modest bundles of belonging are scattered on the ground, a stark symbol of their scattered lives. At night, if lucky, they can take refuge in the camp’s classroom, which during the day serves both as a school or distribution centre for humanitarian organisations such as CARE who support women and children like Marie and her baby.
Note: The Democratic Republic of Congo has one of the highest rates of sexual and gender based violence in the world. Here, it is more dangerous to be a woman than a solider. Armed combatants frequently rape women and girls as a weapon of war even as they try to flee to safety. At least 200,000 cases of sexual violence, mostly involving women and girls, have been documented since 1996. But the actual numbers are believed to be far higher.
ABOUT CARE: Founded in 1945, CARE is a leading humanitarian organization fighting global poverty and providing lifesaving assistance in emergencies. CARE places special focus on working alongside poor girls and women because, equipped with the proper resources, they have the power to help lift whole families and entire communities out of poverty.