Thousands of women brutally raped by marauding militiamen in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are marred by stigma, frequently abandoned by their families and communities.

At a church guesthouse in the centre of Goma, in the Anglican Diocese of Bukavu, the Rev. Desiré Mukanirwa and his wife Claudaline provide a safe haven for victims of gender-based violence to work through their trauma and carve out a new life. The end goal is the women's integration back into society.

Shouldering immense psychological issues, some of the women become pregnant or find themselves infected with HIV as a result of sexual violation.

"We're helping to heal the wounds of trauma," said Desiré over breakfast one July morning at his Goma home. "We didn't want to shut our eyes. We need action."

Ordained a priest in the Province L'Eglise Anglicane du Congo (Anglican Church of Congo) in 1998, the same year the guesthouse opened, Desiré told a chilling story about children, one as young as 3, being raped during the Second Congo War (1998-2003).
 


When women raped by the militia are abandoned and find solace in the Anglican church, Claudaline said, "we pray with them, we joke with them and speak to them in love about how they can be integrated in society."

Claudaline heads a nongovernmental organization that offers trauma counseling, combats adult illiteracy, trains women in professional and domestic skills, and feeds and cares for a growing population of malnourished orphans made parentless through rebel violence or disease or abandoned as rape victims.

It's a ministry replicated throughout Congo's Anglican dioceses at the same time some other churches in Africa's second-largest nation turn their backs on victims of sexual violence.

A mainline Protestant church recently received training in women's rights from Heal Africa, a hospital and community development centre in Goma.

Centre Director and Anglican Lyn Lusi received a letter from the church thanking the organization for the training but noting that some adult leaders strongly opposed the teaching that girls younger than 18 should not marry and that the church shouldn't reject victims of sexual violation.

"Can you believe it?" she asked. "The church that should be helping them and comforting them is throwing them out because they have been raped."

Similarly, Lyn said, some churches force widows, who are considered outcasts in many Congolese communities, to face the wall during worship.

Lyn's stories were among many disturbing accounts about the Congolese's ongoing plight that Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and an Episcopal Church delegation heard during a six-day visit to the dioceses of Bukavu, North Kivu and Boga in late July.

The group learned that the day before they visited Beni, located 190 miles north of Goma in the North Kivu diocese, a girl had been sexually attacked and killed in the village and that rebels had kidnapped a director of a local hospital a few weeks earlier.

"People are dying every day. The government does nothing. They cannot protect us. It's terrible," said the Rev. Albert Atoko-Ntungo, archdeacon for the province, speaking in French as the Rev. Margaret Rose, the Episcopal Church's associate director of mission for programme, interpreted.

"We are brothers and sisters in Christ," Jefferts Schori responded, "and we are glad to be able to stand together."

A former Belgian colony, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has buckled in the hands of corrupt and power-hungry leaders since its independence in 1960.

The vast country – about the same size as the continent of Europe – faced more than three decades of "Africanization" and gross corruption under the presidency of Joseph Mobutu, who was supported by the United States as a "friendly tyrant" for his resistance to the Soviet Union. Rebels led by Laurent Kabila overthrew Mobutu in 1997.

Initially raising hopes, Kabila was installed as the new president and changed the country's name from Zaire to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But his allies became enemies, and Congo entered five years of brutal war in which about 5.4 million people are believed to have perished.

When he was assassinated in 2001, Kabila was succeeded by his son, Joseph Kabila, who remains Congo's president in a power-sharing government that includes former rebels.

The war was fuelled largely by a scramble for the country's vast mineral resources. Rebels in the east, supported by Tutsi militias and neighbouring countries Uganda and Rwanda, battled the Kinshasa-based government, backed by Hutu militias and Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe.

In October 2004, the human rights group Amnesty International announced that 40,000 cases of rape had been reported over the previous six years.

Bloodiest conflict

As Congo – which hosts the United Nations' largest peacekeeping team – attempts to recover from what has been dubbed the bloodiest conflict since World War II, rebel activity still roils the east of the country and is synonymous with gender-based violence, particularly in rural villages.

Some reports reveal stories of rebel soldiers raping women while their husbands are forced to watch, then killing family members and carrying out acts of cannibalism.

In Butembo, a city of 800,000 people about 170 miles north of Goma, abused women shared their painful experiences with visitors at a church-run facility.

Matilda explained how seven months ago two soldiers broke into her home with guns, asked for money, took her by force and raped her in the presence of her husband. Her husband accepted that it was not her fault, and they still live together in their home.

Other women at the centre were less fortunate, thrown out of their homes and forced to seek refuge with other family members or anyone willing to house them.

Another girl was so traumatized that she became mute after three soldiers raped her in a field. The Ven. Valihali Ndungo relayed her story, explaining that she was raped two more times by members of her community, both times becoming pregnant; one baby died during childbirth.

North Kivu Bishop Isesoma – hoping to break the cycle of violence and conscious that its root cause lies with the men of war – began to evangelize government soldiers who, like the rebels, commit these types of atrocities.

"When I saw what the soldiers were doing, I thought that they must not know much about God," he said, "so I visited government [military] camps, preaching to 16,000 soldiers."

Among his multi-faceted vision for healing and building his diocese, Bishop Isesoma hopes to train chaplains who can provide pastoral support to soldiers throughout North Kivu province.

"The church's role is to practise love to one another amid the violence," said Albert Atoko-Ntungo.

"Violence starts at a very young age because the children see it everywhere. They see rape and people being killed as normal. When women are rejected by their families, we welcome them and integrate them [back] into society."

The North Kivu diocese runs a compound that includes the diocesan offices, primary and secondary schools serving some 1600 students, a health clinic, a dentist, pigsties, a community garden, housing and a brick-making facility, all serving one another and interconnected.

The bricks build the school, the nurses treat and educate the students, the housing provides accommodation for the nurses, and the pigs' manure provides fertilizer for the garden.

Health is a major concern in Congo, with preventable diseases such as malaria and measles causing thousands of unnecessary deaths each year, especially among children.

HIV/AIDS infections are rising, due partly to the sexual violence, said Albert Kadukima, the Anglican province's coordinator of the health programmes.

Church-run health centres provide education on preventing HIV infection and other diseases and work with schools to combat HIV among youth. Teen pregnancies are decreasing as a result of the Straight Talk Among the Youth in Schools programme, Kadukima said. The Anglican church runs about 120 schools throughout the province.

The Mothers' Union plays an important role in taking care of women traumatized through sexual violence, said Deacon Caroline Mwanga, a counsellor at the Beni health centre, and one of six women (some of them priests) ordained in the Anglican church.

The United Women for Peace and Social Promotion (Union des Femmes pour la Paix et la Promotion Social – UFPPS) was founded in Katanga in 2003. It built on the work of the Mothers' Union to promote and facilitate women's engagement as messengers of peace and leaders of social and economic development in their communities.

-- Matthew Davies is an Episcopal News Service editor and reporter.