Lane Hartill, CRS’ regional information officer for West Africa, recently visited eastern Congo, where he documented CRS’ response to the sexual violence that is an atrocity of the ongoing war.

The gynecologists at Panzi Hospital, a CRS partner, are some of the best in Congo at repairing reproductive systems that have been destroyed. But I wanted to find out how you fix a woman’s mind, how you heal her spirit.

So I turned to Cécile Mulolo Kamwanya, a psychologist at Panzi Hospital. She’s the head of the psychologist unit. It’s her and her team’s job to help heal women’s psyches, which are sometimes as damaged as their reproductive system.

Cécile told me a story that haunted me for days.

About a year ago, a little girl - I’ll call her Sylvie - was at home in Katama, a community very close to a forest where Hutu rebels, the same ones that committed the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994, are hiding.

The story unfurled like the others: the knock on the door; the demand for money; Sylvie’s father shot. In the confusion her mother fled. Sylvie was left in the house. The seven men took her to the forest, undressed her, and kicked her legs out from under her.

The last thing Sylvie remembered, Cécile said, before completely blacking out, was her legs being spread and men, as Sylvie put it, sleeping on her.

When she came to, she didn’t know what had happened or where she was. She tried to stand up but couldn’t. When she finally made it, she realized she was incontinent. She wandered for two days before an old man found her and led her by the hand back to her village.

She eventually made it to Panzi. But she was physically too small – only 10 years old – to be operated on. So for the next three or four years, she waits, no longer able to control the urine that seeps out of her.

“With a little girl like that, the first thing you must do is show affection,” says Cécile. “You must approach them even if they smell bad. If she came to your office, you’d open all the windows. The urine flows out of her. She smells very bad.

But Cécile loves her. They chat. Cécile puts her arm around Sylvie, as if she was her daughter. The whole time, Cécile is pretending she doesn’t smell anything. Cécile says a recent conversation went like this:

“I tell her to be patient, they’re going to take care of you, but you’re still too little. I ask her what she wants to do with her life.

‘I can’t get married. I’m going to be a nun.’

Why do you want to be a nun? Why don’t you want to marry?

‘Who’s going to want me? What man is going to love me?’

Be patient. And when they take care of you, you’ll be healed. You can then marry.

‘But I’m no longer a virgin. I’ve lost my virginity. Can someone who has lost her virginity, can a man love them?’

The value of a woman isn’t based on her virginity,” Cécile tells her.

Sylvie developed hatred toward men, says Cécile. But slowly she convinced her that all men aren’t bad.

“Only the ones that did this to you,” she says. “You’re papa was a good man. He loved your mama, didn’t he? He loved you. Was your papa bad?

No, Sylvie, said. Her papa wasn’t bad.

Lane Hartill, CRS’ regional information officer for West Africa, recently visited eastern Congo, where he documented CRS’ response to the sexual violence that is an atrocity of the ongoing war.

The stories of rape in eastern Congo are remarkably similar in their horror. Most of them start out the same way: A knock on the door. The armed men enter. The husband is beaten or killed. Then comes the gang rape.

But when you are actually sitting in front of a woman and she’s looking you in the eye, telling you in a monotone voice how they raped her, and you can see when she looks away, when her body language shifts, you know it’s hurting her again.

That’s when the rapes in Congo hit you.

It was like that when I talked with Birava. She recently moved into a new shack because she was taunted so badly in her previous neighborhood because she’d been raped. Her new place costs, $5 a month. But as a single mother with five children to feed, she has a hard time making rent.

We sat on vegetable oil tins and jerry cans in the front room, the one with the mud floor. She sat on a discarded engine block. She’d carefully folded some cloth for cushions. She told me her story. About the 12 soldiers who’d raped her. About the 6 miles she gingerly walked to Panzi with a prolapsed uterus. About the HIV she contracted from her now-deceased husband. And about her husband’s family who showed up recently wanting to take her kids away from her.

Birava didn’t hesitate to tell her story. I can’t imagine anyone going through something like this, then pouring her heart out to a complete stranger. Maybe it’s cathartic, I thought. Maybe she needs this.

A big part of her recovery is owed to Mama Jeanette, a counselor who volunteers for CRS’ partner, Foundation Femme Plus. She has turned into an older sister for Birava.
“She doesn’t do anything without telling me,” Jeanette says. Jeanette told me when the two are alone, Birava even has a sense of humor.

“Even though I have HIV,” she’ll sing, “I’m still living.”

Lane Hartill, CRS’ regional information officer for West Africa, describes his visit to a CRS-funded hospital in a rural area of Eastern Congo that is treating women who have been raped, an atrocity of the ongoing war.

I went on rounds with Dr. Freddy Mubuto, the head doctor at Nyamibungu Mother and Child Hospital, to see what he faces everyday. He and his fellow doctor, Faustin, are the only two doctors in an area with around 103,000 people.

Dr. Freddy Mubuto, head doctor at Nyamibungu Mother and Child Hospital in Eastern Congo. Photo by Lane Hartill/CRS

I knew seeing his patients wasn’t going to be easy. I steeled myself against the hot rush of emotion, but it came anyway. Reality, it seemed, was going to have its way with me.

One of the first women we saw had been taking her medicine religiously, said Mubuto, but she hadn’t eaten in days, causing complications. With a shake of his head, and in that calm, velvet voice, he explained to her why she had to eat, knowing all too well that she had no money for food.

A pretty woman, the wife of a gold miner, wearing clean red Puma slippers and silver earrings, had walked 25 miles to get to the hospital. She had the Congo’s flag painted on each toenail. She was having stomach pains, she said, could he help?

Mubuto suspected tuberculosis or a genital infection. She was only 25, but had already had three children. Only one was still alive. I didn’t have the stomach to ask her how the others had died.

The hospital has a sonogram machine and Mubuto spent much of the afternoon squirting gel on stomachs the size of beach balls and waving the wand over them. One lady had a scar running south from her bellybutton; it was as thick as a rope of licorice. Another physician had given her a C-section and done and awful job sewing her up. That wasn’t important, though: The baby inside looked just fine.

These were the easy cases. It’s when the rape cases come in – and the women who were forced to stay in the village to give birth – that things get complicated.

Mubuto sometimes finds himself facing complex emergencies he doesn’t know how to handle. He looks at reproductive systems so mutilated that he has to try something even if he’s never seen the problem. If he doesn’t, he says, they’ll surely die.

Like the time he worked on a woman - the surprise and disgust still registers in Mubuto’s voice – who had toxic leaves forced deep into her birth canal. So far, in fact, it punctured her uterus and the leaves entered her abdomen, causing her intestines to become infected.

Dr. Freddy Mubuto on his rounds. Photo by Lane Hartill/CRS

After surgery, piles of pills, and a three-month stay, “She didn’t pay a single cent,” he said. Instead, she went to the court and brought a suit against the feticheur, the traditional doctor who had prescribed the treatment. She accused him of premeditated murder. Many women, Mubuto said, sneak out of the hospital at night, avoiding payment. He has no recourse.

He says the women rely on feticheurs out of ignorance. It bothered him so much, he visited a few local villages to persuade women to come to the hospital. He also talked to village chiefs who agree with him and promise the village women will go to the hospital from now on. He says he’s seen a slight uptick in the number of women coming to him first, but the feticheur problem is still overwhelming.

You’d think all this would get to Mubuto, that he too would sneak out of a window at night and escape. But he doesn’t. He stays because it’s in his blood. His father was a well-known doctor and several of his siblings are also in the medical profession.

He politely asks me about how he can get additional training. He says a good anesthesiologist is needed at the hospital because many gynecological operations can’t be done with a local anesthetic. But if that’s not possible, maybe $75 a month to buy fuel for the generator is.

When I got home, I emailed my college roommate, now a respected anesthesiologist in Seattle. I told him how some men in the U.S. smirk and giggle at the mention of gynecology, how it’s a punch line, not a profession.

That’s not true. Definitely not in Congo.