Name: Cocerned Citizen. 2009-10-15 7:00
>So she traded bananas and peanuts until she’d saved 1.50 in Congolese francs, then set out for Bukavu. She walked with balled-up fabric clenched between her thighs, to soak up blood that had been oozing from her vagina for two years, since she had been gang-raped by Rwandan militia soldiers
>Here, Thérèse takes her place in line, along with 80 women, waiting for surgery to rebuild her vagina. Dr. Denis Mukwege, Panzi’s sole gynecologist and one of two doctors in the eastern Congo who can perform such reconstructive surgeries, can repair only five women a week. The air is thick with flies. It reeks from women with fistula: rips in the vaginal wall where rape tore out chunks of flesh separating the bladder and rectum from the vagina.
>Each armed group has a trademark manner of violating, he explains. The Burundians rape men as well as women. The Mai Mai — local defense forces — rape with branches or bayonets, and mutilate their victims. The Rwandans, like those who attacked Thérèse, set groups of soldiers to rape one woman.
>“I had nothing, not even antibiotics, to give them.” Not that antibiotics would have helped much: “Most cases were traumatization of the genitals: These women had been raped with a tree branch or the barrel of a gun, or a bayonet. When you see a woman who was forced by 10 men — the trauma…”
>Here, Thérèse takes her place in line, along with 80 women, waiting for surgery to rebuild her vagina. Dr. Denis Mukwege, Panzi’s sole gynecologist and one of two doctors in the eastern Congo who can perform such reconstructive surgeries, can repair only five women a week. The air is thick with flies. It reeks from women with fistula: rips in the vaginal wall where rape tore out chunks of flesh separating the bladder and rectum from the vagina.
>Each armed group has a trademark manner of violating, he explains. The Burundians rape men as well as women. The Mai Mai — local defense forces — rape with branches or bayonets, and mutilate their victims. The Rwandans, like those who attacked Thérèse, set groups of soldiers to rape one woman.
>“I had nothing, not even antibiotics, to give them.” Not that antibiotics would have helped much: “Most cases were traumatization of the genitals: These women had been raped with a tree branch or the barrel of a gun, or a bayonet. When you see a woman who was forced by 10 men — the trauma…”