I was asked to spend the first day with the women of the area. A separate program had been set up just for women who were victims of rape and HIV/AIDS. Having had no personal experience with this, I wasn’t sure that I could be of much help to them. But God showed me that He could use my witness, despite the differences.
As I limped to the front, a very helpful young man scooted a chair over to me so I could prop up my injured foot as I stood to speak. I thought back on a song I had heard in June, “Speak For Me” by Jaci Velasquez, and how I had asked my niece, Kelli, to sing that song when Rob came to Texas to visit over the summer, and how I felt like that song just really fit the time I had spent in Africa last Spring. And now here I was again. The words I could remember from that song kept playing in my head, and they became my prayer: “Speak for me, this my plea, that the people will be blessed…” And I shared our story. With the help of a very gifted interpreter I shared my compassion for them, but even more, God’s compassion, His anguish over their hurt, and His unending Love for them.
And then something amazing happened. One of my teammates who was scheduled to speak after me, had told me before we began that she had no idea what to say, and that she hoped I would take a long time.
But as I spoke, the plan was revealed to her. To a room full of at least 300 women, my teammate asked them to divide into four groups and to share, two at a time, how God has helped them through trials. We could not have been prepared for what we were about to see.
Because these women came from areas all around Bukavu and were from different tribes, many different languages were being spoken. Some needed the assistance of others in their group who could translate from one of the tribal languages into Swahili or French.
As we watched, our interpreter would pick up some parts of the stories and let us know what they were saying – they were all relating their experiences of rape and terror. Then the noise became louder and the activity became busier in the center of one of the groups. A group of women were acting out the things that happen to them. A child was stripped from his mother’s arms, tossed to the ground, and the mother attacked. The women acted out killing the child and terrifying the mother before dragging her off to the bush to be their slave for however long they wanted her. The next step became very clear to us. We wanted to hear these stories spoken to us through their own lips.
So after a short break, we asked some of the women to come up front and tell us, through the interpreter, their own stories. And over and over, we heard these disturbing facts:
“The soldiers came to our home and killed my husband and my children and I was taken out to the bush for nine months and passed around from one soldier to another every day. I was beaten and hardly ever given food, and I wanted to die. They raped me many, many times, sometimes with guns.”
“…and now I have this baby, and I don’t know who the father is...”
“…and my husband will not allow me back in the home because I have been with another man…”
“…and they raped my sister with a bayonet and she died…”
“…I am 13 years old…”
“…I am 67 years old…”
“…and now I have no place to sleep and no food and I cannot find work and there is no help…”
“…and because I am now homeless, I have to live on the street, where I am a prime target for the soldiers, again…”
‘The soldiers’ refers to Rwandan soldiers and to UN soldiers. Like it or not, it is a fact that your tax dollars are going to support UN soldiers in Congo who are doing this.
And so that you don’t think this is a thing of the past that is no longer happening, let me assure you, we saw the soldiers there ourselves. They are still there and these very things are still happening. Much of it is remnants of the Hutu/Tutsi problems in Rwanda, as well as civil war in Congo. But those are just the outlets for Satan. The real murderer is Satan.
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