There was a long war, a big fight. During the war fighters arrived at our village and were shooting a lot, no-one had seen so much shooting. They burned all the houses.

My father, who was a local chief in my village, was burned alive. My mother was raped. I was with my younger sister.  We cried when they were raping our mother.  They killed her and took us and all our things away.  

My younger sister and I were separated.  I’ve never found out what happened to her.

We spent about a week walking through forests and arrived at an FDLR camp. I spent seven months with militia. We were their puppets. They insulted us. Each night they’d go from one girl to another.

I asked a woman there if this would be our life, and if we should do something. So we waited until they went to work and we escaped. We spent two weeks walking, just eating fruit. When we got to a stream we had to eat sand until we reached the road.

Our feet were swollen for two days after we arrived. The woman was so badly affected that she died.

I was pregnant and I didn’t know what to do. I saw Masika in the village and I told her my story. She was very shocked and brought me here.

I wanted to kill myself. My mind was made up, but Masika gave me advice. I had no clothes, so she gave me some. She took me to a health centre for treatment. When I gave birth she brought clothes for me and the baby.  Afterwards, she asked me what I dreamed of being. I didn’t know, but she said she would send me to school.

Once, Masika went to my home village to negotiate with my relatives my return. But they said no, and asked why should we keep her? They said I would have to kill my child. I saw him as an obstacle to reuniting my family. They were sorry, but said girls are expensive, and that if I was a boy it would have been better.

I always feel sad that my child asks who his father is, and instead of replying I just weep.  

I never dream. I can’t stop thinking of my parents. Life is nothing for this. Everybody points at you. I find that rape causes “deception”. Because of rape you can miss many things. I think that if I got my diploma no-one would employ me because I’ve been raped.

I feel really very sad. If mama Masika dies what will happen to us? I think about this everyday. Where would we go? I’ve never told her this before. I speak to her about my life, I don’t know what will become of it. The problem is, people around us don’t like us and think we were raped because we wanted it.

She was thirteen when she was raped.

This is her story.

We were in Karuba when the shouting started. They killed five of us. They said they wanted money, so I gave them what I had hoping they’d leave us alone. But we had to go with them.

They beat us and tore our clothes. They took us to a camp.

When we arrived they killed my friend. I was taken underground and told “this is where you’ll be living”. I said it would be better to kill me than live like this. In this underground place, they came to rape me. I couldn’t leave, this was my life. 

I got my first period in that hole. I didn’t know what it was. The next month I didn’t get it again, and I didn’t know why.

Then there was an attack, the men went to fight and a woman helped me to escape. I  managed to get back home, but my mum thought I was a bad spirit, she thought I was a ghost, she thought I’d died a long time ago. The pastors tried to explain this wasn’t true, but my mum refused to believe them, so they left me outside a neighbour’s house hoping she would change her mind. At this time I found out my father had been shot dead.

I was angry. I saw my life was worth nothing. I thought it would be better to just kill myself.

But I was with a woman who took me to Masika for help. Masika warmly welcomed me, washed me, gave me clothes, told me my life and pregnancy would be OK.

When I gave birth she brought clothes for me and the baby. When he was six months old Masika tried to take me home. But the village said if they were going to accept me, my baby had to be killed.

Masika said no. She sent me to school.

When my baby was one, he was very sick. We took him to the hospital. It was  very difficult. I found it hard that he was causing so much suffering. I thought I’d either kill myself or the child, so I ran away. Masika found me and since then she’s advised me on how to deal with what I’ve been through.

At first I thought I was alone, but when I came here, every week, every month I began to see more and more cases like mine.

She feels she must now help other women.

Before the war Masika was happily married with four daughters. Her husband was a big businessman in Bitumbi. They had cars, a sign of vast wealth in the DRC. When the war started in 1999, the soldiers came and took everything. It was 29^th October at 11pm, her husband said, take it all, but they replied “we only want your life”. They cut him up, piece by piece in front of Masika. She says it was the CNDP,  the Tutsi’s from Rwanda, who were fighting against Ngilima, a local Mai Mai commander.  As they cut her husband up, they said “we must be careful, they don’t always die”. He was alive as they were attacking him, even when they cut his stomach open. It was only when they cut his heart out that he stopped crying.

She says: “I wanted to cry out but they put a gun to my head. One man cut my face with a knife, then my hands and legs as I tried to protect myself from him. When they had cut up my husband they asked me if I had ever chewed gum, I said yes so they took a piece of my husband and made me eat it. I was about to be sick but they beat me.  They made me pick up pieces of him and made me lie on them and then they started to rape me. I counted up to 12 men but when I got to 12 I heard my daughters screaming, they were raping them. I lost consciousness after that. My daughters were 12 and 14 years old then”.

Both of her daughters became pregnant from the rape.

Initially, Masika says she was out of her mind. When she came to, she found herself in hospital, and had blocked out that her husband had been murdered or that her daughters had been raped and were now pregnant. They came to her, Yvette and Rachelle, saying “dont you remember the day Papa was killed?” Initially her husband’s family wanted her to marry her brother-in-law. She refused and so they sold all her husbands belongings and left her destitute. They chased her away with her 4 daughters. She came to Minova with just a plastic bag of possessions.

In January 2009 she was raped again, this time by the Pareco / Mai Mai. She was taking a raped woman to hospital. She feels has to keep going otherwise there would be nothing left, “I will keep going until they kill me”.

Her two daughters are still with her, she is trying to find husbands for them, but when they get close, the neighbours tell the men not to marry them because they have been raped and have babies. Sometimes the girls want to kill their babies but she tells them they must not, that the babies are innocent.

Even she has no way to explain the brutality, just that the women have become weapons of war in Congo. If the women are pregnant when they are raped, they are usually cut open by the perpetrators. Often sticks and other implements are found inside the women when they are taken to hospital.

She says: “I don’t think they consider us as women anymore. That we are no longer human beings, that we are only objects of pleasure. It’s as though they want to punish and destroy Congolese women.”

She says in villages, the boys have to leave for the city to find a girl to marry because all the girls have been raped.  The boys have no confidence in the girls anymore.  She says it is very rare to find a girl of 14 or 15 who has NOT been raped. She says that part of her work now is to go and talk to boys to tell them that it’s not the girls’ fault. But still it is very difficult, they say “how can I give my dowry to a girl who has been raped by 10 men?”