Mama Muliri (left) and Judy Anderson

Mama Muliri
Democratic Republic of Congo

Jeanne Muliri Kabekatyo is known as “Mama Muliri” to her friends and colleagues. She pioneered the Heal My People program at HEAL Africa, a Congolese relief organization centered in Goma. Below is an excerpt from an interview conducted by HEAL Africa.

Prefer to listen to the interview (translated by HEAL’s Executive Director Judy Anderson )? Just click this link! http://www.healafrica.org/cms/audio/MuliriHMPEnglish.mp3

Let me tell you about the work we are doing with women who had real pain, real sorrow. You know the stories of what had happened to women but what we were really concerned about is that they not live with the stories of their past as victims of sexual violence.

When we first started they were victims but then we said they’re no longer victims because these women that we have been working with have been cared for medically, their emotional state has improved. We started thinking: what other words can we use? We started calling them survivors. We thought: survivors, well yeah they are survivors but how long are they going to be survivors? How many years can they live as survivors? Where does that leave them? We need to give them a way to show how strong they can be and we want them to think of themselves as strong within the community. We want to also change the name.

How will that name change? They need to be strong enough to do hard work. It also has to be work that they can do well and that they can see the value of and the worth of. We work with women and then when they return home we put them with the other women in the communities so that they are all strong together. The women that come back have strength that is accepted and valued in the community and they can work together for their own futures. They can do handiwork, they can work in the gardens, they can sell small items in markets. They find a way to see themselves again as a woman, like the other women in the community.

These women also learn how to accept each other and welcome each other. The women that had a terrible experience during the war are no longer pointed out with the finger, “See that one.” The women that we have worked with, that we have helped heal are now with their other women in community. They are working together.

I want to just tell you a little bit about some of the work that they are doing with credit. They call it in French rotating credit. These women are working with loans. They are repaying the loans which then go to another woman. This makes a huge change in the possibilities for women in communities. If you go into a village you are not going to know who has what history or what past. No matter what happened to them in the way they will all be women together.

So we have buried the word victim. We have buried the word survivor. Now these women are called the strong women of the community. They are the hope for the future of Congo. These women have buried their pasts and they are going into the future. What we see is that if in the next two or three years we have no more wars Congo will have a whole different look. And that is why we women are standing together to say: NO MORE WAR. If somebody comes to us proposing another war for another reason we will stand together and say: No More. Enough is enough.