HÉLÈNE WAMUZILA

Wamuzila means ‘Born on the Road’.

In 1999, at age 14, Hélène was raped only a short distance away from her home in Eastern Congo.  Her attackers were members of the Interahamwe: a genocidal rebel group of Hutus from Rwanda. These men brutally attacked this young girl with bayonets, but this was only the beginning of her nightmare.

After Hélène was attacked, her family disowned her, considering her a dirty unmarriageable woman. This young woman was bedridden for 7 months due to her injuries, but she was determined to reclaim her life – admirable for just a teenage girl. Slowly over time, she began to crawl and eventually walk with a cane. One day, a UNICEF representative came to her home and recognizing the severity of her condition, he made the arrangements to have her transported to the medical facility: Panzi Hospital.

While at Panzi, Helene underwent two fistula-repair surgeries before returning to her home village of Shabunda. Sadly, she found her home over-run by members of the RCD: a Rwandan-backed militia group. It didn’t take long before this remarkable young woman was captured again as a ‘war-bride’ and became pregnant. She was forced to move with her ‘husband’ to a village 120 miles away from her home: Kamituga. There she birthed her child via C-section. This child of rape died shortly after and Helene once again had to undergo multiple surgeries, again to repair an obstetric fistula. As is so often the case, Helene’s “husband” turned her away from their home, considering her worthless to him because of the fistula.

Helene returned to Panzi, where she underwent 4 more surgeries. It was in 2006 as she was healing from surgery that Scott and our team of film-makers met this young lady who forever changed their lives.

Sadly after surviving so much, and having been dealt such a tough lot in life, in 2008 Helene became ill and passed away.

When Scott, Brad and Melanie met Hélène, she was a leader among her peers, a fun-loving, intelligent young woman, who wanted badly to get an education and never gave up hope in life. Her death was a blow to our WiWZ founders. We lost a friend in Hélène. But even though her death was a tragic, horrendously typical demise for a Congolese woman – it was the dreams she was never able to fulfill that drove the creation of the WiWZ movement.

Thank you Hélène.

Bijoux

Typical thirteen year-olds don’t have the same story that our lovely Bijoux had.

Bijoux was attacked by a group of three Mai Mai soldiers while on her way to her grandmother's house.  

She was brought to the Panzi Hospital for fistula-repair and while there, underwent three surgeries before being healed. Bijoux’s dream was to become a nurse when she grew up, but her rape and the ensuing surgeries knocked her out of school and prevented her from achieving those dreams.

Perhaps this is the most tragic truth for women in Congo: war, rape, and violence cuts short their dreams...and effectively their lives.

In 2010 Scott returned to Bijoux’s village to find her married and pregnant. Her life has become that of the typical Congolese woman’s - thriving in one sense, but burdened, poverty-stricken and unable to cling to the dreams that made her stand out as a child.

Since returning to her village, Bijoux has yet to return to school to continue her education.