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November 2006
On a recent trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, our American, Rwandan and Congolese team visited the Eastern city of Goma. Goma, a city blanketed in stark poverty—pot-holed roads, deserted buildings, and black-lava rock from the volcano eruption of Mount Nyiragongoin in January 2001. In spite of the cease-war in that region, it is no secret that it continues to be a hotbed of violence with armed rebels terrorizing the area. The latest war which killed over 4 million people (mostly from hunger and disease) was launched from this once, beautiful city located on Lake Kivu.
blue tarp-walled room
It was my third visit to Goma and my team was on mission: to visit a small hospital where victims of the present war have been rescued and brought to the hospital for treatment. Nothing prepared us for the experience.

In the back of the hospital, huddled in a dark, blue tarp-walled room, 23 women sit on wooden slats of beds, looking down at their feet. When I ask them if we could talk to them, the response was barely audible. Pain blanks out their eyes and jags their voice and I realize that I am asking them to remember their trek through hell.

In halting, quiet tones they tell of horrors that none of us have experienced: rebels coming into their homes and killing their families in front of them, of being raped, of being kidnapped and used for gang rapes in rebel camps for months, of having to have multiple surgeries so that they can use their bodily functions again. Their captors have used sticks, guns and knives on their bodies.
 
One 13 year old is traumatized for life, her belly large with her captor's child.
Her childhood has been violently ripped from her, her future forever altered. On the way out of the compound, they introduced me to another girl.

“Mary,” they called me. “Come meet this four year old. I turned to see a sweet doll-baby dressed in a ten-year-old’s dress with holes in it. “She was raped too” they said.

The experience still haunts me. I am convinced that we were privileged to see the "treasures of darkness” in a dark, tarp-walled room in the Congo…incredibly precious and valuable to God. In the knowing, there comes a responsibility to do. Something. Anything. No one can walk away free.

From that trip, we now have a team of four Congolese Christians who are visiting the hospital once a week, taking hope and getting involved with their lives. That of course is not enough. They are suffering from multiple diseases, trauma and vitamin deficiency.

We would like to rent a house in the city of Goma and help heal and integrate these broken women back into their society. For five hundred dollars a month we can rent a home, begin taking in women, feeding them, sending some to school, teaching others an occupation.

Would you consider being a part of the outreach to the women of the Congo? Your best gift can help send supplies to the frontlines where the battle is still raging and the victims of war are dying. With your help we will never go empty handed to these women again.

For the lost girls of the Congo,

Mary Dunham Faulkner



p.s. We can’t stay paralyzed. Helping one…or…five…or twenty five hundred of these women may be a drop in the bucket compared to the need in the Congo. But it makes an eternal difference.

Leah’s Sisters · PO Box 17-1234 · Irving, TX 75017
phone: 214.886.1093 · email: mary@leahssisters.org