Project Resilience, formed in Los
Angeles by a group of friends, aims to effect immediate and long-term
change for women who are victims of physical and emotional violence,
supporting recovery and restoring hope for a future with dignity and
independence.
At present we are working to serve the urgent needs of women who are
victims of mass sexual violence in the ongoing Civil War in the
Democratic Republic of Congo, where a decade of war has claimed the
lives of more than five million people, making this the most deadly
conflict since WWII.
In this war-ravaged country, women’s bodies have been reduced to
battlefields as they are tortured, mutilated, gang-raped before their
families, forced into sexual slavery, and left for dead.
In 1999 gynecologic surgeon Dr. Dennis Mukwege Mukengere joined Panzi
Hospital (L’Hopital de Panzi),
located in the eastern DRC, where as many as 70% of all women have been
raped or sexually mutilated.
He continues to serve as the Director of the hospital and is the only
gynecologic surgeon working full time there.
Mukwege offers much-needed medical attention for these
women. The hospital admits
an estimated 3,600 rape victims per year, offering treatment for the
host of critical health problems plaguing them, including sexually
transmitted diseases (including HIV), pregnancy, and fistula, a
condition that results in incontinence of urine, stool, or both, often
leaving victims homeless and destitute.
The hospital receives ten women per day on average, one-third of
whom require major surgery in order to restore their broken bodies.
In 2007, Panzi Hospital and Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
(HHI), a university inter-faculty-initiative based at the Harvard School
of Public Health, partnered together in order to help train doctors,
build capacity, treat victims, and undertake an aggressive research
program designed to uncover the root causes of gender based violence in
order to intervene and prevent further atrocities. The mission of HHI is
to relieve human suffering in war and disaster by advancing the science
and practice of humanitarian response worldwide.
Project Resilience:
All women deserve to live with dignity, without fear, in peace,
and with full ownership over their own bodies.
A woman’s body is not a battlefield.