V-Day Blog Archive

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Meet Rada Boric, V-Day Campaign coordinator for Eastern Europe (VITA EUROPE)

http://www.vita.it/news/view/111378

By Ottavia Spaggiari

Meet Rada Boric, V-Day Campaign coordinator for Eastern Europe

“People think that vaginas are more dangerous than the atomic bomb” says Rada Boric and she knows full well that they are right. For more than ten years she has been one of the thousands of women volunteers to produce benefit performances of Eve Ensler’s The vagina monologues, through V-Day campaigns, in order to raise awareness and funds to finance projects that fight violence towards women. If Boric is aware that the ”v-word” still has the power to make people blush, she also knows how important it is to reclaim it. During the war in the Balkans she was among the creators of the Center for Women War Victims in Croatia and she is now board member of the women’s rights organization European Women’s Lobby and executive director at the Center for Women’s Studies in Zagreb. In 2008 she co-produced V-Day Zagreb-Belgrade-Sarajevo, Vagina Triangle. For the occasion a group of actresses travelled on a small van to perform the show in the three cities that had been mostly hit by the conflict, in only three days. We meet Boric to talk about her life as an activist and the success of the V-Day event she organized in Zagreb last April, which for the first time brought women with disabilities on stage .

How did you become involved in the V-Day organization?

It all started with my friendship with Eve Ensler. In 1993, during the war in former Yugoslavia I was working as a program coordinator at the Center for Women War Victims. I worked with refugee women and women who had been raped during the war, regardless of their ethnicity. One day we received a fax from Eve Ensler, she had read about what was happening in the Balkans in The New York Times and she wanted to support us. She came to the center and she took part in the self support workshops I’d been running at the refugee camp. She talked with many women who had been raped and she wrote a monologue, My vagina was my village, about the story of a woman I worked with, that was later included in the play The vagina monologues. Many of the monologues were written here. We became friends and I started organizing performances of the play not only in the Balkans, but also in Bulgaria and in Finland.

How did you get the idea for this year’s V-Day?

I wanted to emphasize the fact that women with disabilities feel desire too, that they are like everybody else, except they have a disability. I was in Sarajevo at a conference and saw this picture of Marylyn Monroe in a wheelchair, which later became the poster of this year’s V-Day event in Zagreb. That was my vision. I organized a meeting with the president of the Association of People with Disabilities. We gathered together many members of the association, both men and women. I told them about the V-Day and asked if anybody was interested in participating and I was amazed by the number of women who decided to take part in it.

What was so special about this V-Day?

What I loved about it was not only the fact that the actresses took it very professionally, but also that in between the monologues they also shared their own personal stories. The whole performance had a double impact. It empowered them and I think it was great for the public.

During the war in former Yugoslavia, 20 thousand women were raped as a systematic tactic of war. The monologue My vagina was my village is about this. What does it mean to perform a V-Day in the Balkans?

My vagina was my village makes people cry everywhere it is performed, and of course it is the same here in the Balkans. The first time we did a V-Day in Sarajevo or in Zagreb I thought there would be some kind or resistance to the word itself but after the first moments, when women hesitated, they all started to laugh and cry. The best feedback I had was when we did the Triangle tour and I invited the bus driver to see the show. Later that night he told me: “Mrs. Boric I have to thank you very much. The whole performance I was sitting there and thinking how little I knew about my wife.” Every year we do it we have more and more men in the audience, they’re getting more sensitive about women’s issues. When Eve performed the play in Sarajevo the mayor received us and Eve wanted me to translate that she was happy to be in a Vagina friendly town. I hesitated, because I wasn’t sure if using the word vagina would have been appropriate but then I said it and the mayor was flattered. I think that V-Day has had a great impact in the Balkans and I believe that the Bosnian piece helped, also because there’s an introduction that tells about how many women were raped during the war and it is dedicated to them and to our land.

What do you value the most about the V-Day experience?

The V-Day allows us to see the results when you deal with women’s issues on an artistic level . Art really touches our hearts and souls and it’s one of the best ways you can improve activism. V-Day creates a great synergy between politics and art and this is the best experience for me.

Get active: www.vday.org

VIVA VEVOLUTION – V-Day NYC Benefit & Eve’s Birthday – June 8th

EVE ENSLER, V-DAY, CAROLE BLACK, MICHAEL BALAOING, JENNIFER BUFFETT, ROSARIO DAWSON, BETH DOZORETZ, JANE FONDA, DONNA KARAN, BETH KARPFINGER, KATHERINE MCFATE, PAT MITCHELL, THANDIE NEWTON, LINDA POPE, EMILY SCOTT POTTRUCK, AMY RAO, CARI ROSS, DAVID STONE, SUSAN CELIA SWAN, AND KERRY WASHINGTON*
INVITE YOU TO A VERY SPECIAL EVENING

VIVA VEVOLUTION!

CELEBRATE V-DAY,
ENDING VIOLENCE,
& THE VAGINA REVOLUTION.

({ WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8, 6:30PM })

URBAN ZEN CENTER at STEPHAN WEISS STUDIO
711 GREENWICH STREET at CHARLES STREET, NYC

Experience V-Day’s Revolutionary Work to
End Violence Against Women and Girls Around the World

& join us as we honor NoVo Foundation President and Co-Chair/V-Day Board Member Jennifer Buffett WITH THE STONE AWARD FOR HER extraordinary philanthropy & vision!

SPECIAL GUESTS FROM HAITI & CONGO

Immediately following the event, stay with us to enjoy a special birthday dance party celebration for Eve Ensler.

TICKETS: $250; $1,000; $2,500; $25,000

To purchase tickets, visit HTTP://WWW.VDAY.ORG/VIVA2011
For tables and sponsorship inquiries, email EVENTS@VDAY.ORG or call 505-204-8803

PROCEEDS BENEFIT V-DAY, THE GLOBAL ACTIVIST MOVEMENT TO END VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS, VDAY.ORG

DRESS AS IF YOU WERE FULLY ALIVE AND COMPLETELY YOURSELF
(NOTE: EVERYTHING GOES. WE DARE YOU!)

*pending scheduling

NEW: Photos from V-Day’s Recent Visit to Haiti Now Online

In late March, V-Day Founder/Artistic Director Eve Ensler, Executive Director Susan Celia Swan, Managing Director – Campaigns & Development Cecile Lipworth, and Programs & Development Director Purva Panday Cullman traveled to Port-au-Prince and Cap Haitien, Haiti, to visit the V-Day safe house and legal justice centers, and meet with V-Day activist Elvire Eugene to see first hand the work of AFASDA and other women’s groups on the ground.

The V-Day safe house and legal justices centers, which are supported by the work of thousands of V-Day activists all over the world through the 2011 V-Day Spotlight Campaign on the Women and Girls of Haiti, are sheltering women and their children who have survived sexual violence, and providing them with support services and legal assistance, working towards ending the cycle of impunity with which the rapes are occurring.

The V-Day team, who were joined on the trip by Mike Szalkowski, Executive Director of the Carlo and Micol Schejola Foundation, and Matt Petersen, President and CEO of Global Green USA, met with many of the local women activists, beneficiaries, and survivors who are creating and maintaining the campaign on the ground. Photojournalist Ana Bianca Marin was on hand to capture the trip and we invite you all to explore the new online photo gallery.

Stay tuned for more updates from the team in the upcoming weeks!

VIEW Photo Gallery >

Charlize Theron: Hope in the Congo (The Huffington Post)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charlize-theron/hope-city-of-joy_b_848629….

By Charlize Theron

In 2009, I visited the Democratic Republic of Congo for the first time and I remember feeling utterly overwhelmed. It was a trip that really opened my eyes or, should I say, slapped me in the face with the realities of the country. I had heard so much about the violence, particularly against women, but nothing had prepared me. I listened to stories from women and girls about extreme horrors inflicted on them. I learned how families and villages have been torn apart through a plague of terror using sexual violence as a tool of destruction. It was a kind of devastation that I had never seen before.

I left the country questioning what we could do, when the organization V-Day offered a ray of hope with the City of Joy. The City of Joy is a place where survivors of sexual violence can go to heal physically and emotionally, and gain skills and leadership training through programming. The knowledge they gain here will allow them to return to their homes with tools to help rebuild their lives. The concept seemed innovative and I was particularly drawn to the fact that it was thought up completely by the women of the DRC themselves. Who better to decide how to address their real needs?

In February, I had the opportunity to go back to the DRC for the City of Joy opening. A group of us, a V-Day delegation, came together from various parts of the world to travel to Bukavu. In all honesty, part of me was scared. Scared to return and open myself up to the all the emotions and heartache of this country, but it was also fear that drove me back. How can we not return when the situation there is so dire? How dare I let my fear even for a moment make me think twice, when these people live with this fear everyday? So I went and, along with the rest of the delegation, arrived with all the love and hope I could possibly bring. We showed up not only to celebrate something joyful in the midst of all this chaos — the opening of the City of Joy — but also to remind the women of Bukavu that they are not forgotten.

Photo by Paula Allen for V-Day

The opening celebration was absolutely incredible. There were hundreds of women and community members dancing, speaking out, and there was so much gratitude and hope. And yet amid the happiness there was still the reality of the situation around us. One Congolese woman got up and spoke and I found her particularly brave and inspiring. She said, “If this was happening in your country it would have ended a long time ago.” She is right. Never would we turn our backs on people in the developed world in the way that the world turns its back on the DRC. V-Day founder Eve Ensler said something amazing that I can’t quote directly, but it was to the effect of “Congo is the heart of Africa and Africa is the heart of the world. And what affects the heart affects all of us”. This country is bleeding to death and it’s up to us to step in and help put an end to this. There is no excuse good enough to allow such crimes against humanity to continue.

In some ways the work we do in the DRC seems like a tiny drop in a big bucket of violence. At the same time I saw and felt the incredible potential that day. These women are capable of so much. A small example is in the construction of the City of Joy. V-Day chose to use a mostly female construction team, likely a first in the history of the DRC. Many doubted their capabilities, but the women welcomed and rose to the challenge. The construction is outstanding and these women, now beginning to understand their own potential, have decided to create their own construction business. V-Day was inspired by this and gave the women a grant to get their business off the ground.

The City of Joy has the capacity to change and inspire groups of women. These women can change their communities. And these communities can change the province and the country. I believe it is in this way that the message of turning pain to power can spread like an epidemic. Just as violence and terror spread throughout the country, why can there not be an epidemic of empowerment and peace?

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon once said, “Investing in women is not only the right thing to do. It is the smart thing to do.

“I am deeply convinced that, in women, the world has at its disposal the most significant and yet largely untapped potential for development and peace. Gender equality is not only a goal in itself, but a prerequisite for reaching all the other international development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals.”

Let us hope the City of Joy will be the place where attitudes may be changed about the value of women and where the movement of equality in the DRC starts, so that we may someday see an end to the violence and a better quality of life for all.

Charlize Theron is a United Nations Messenger of Peace with a special focus on promoting the end of violence against women. She was appointed by current UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in November 2008.

V-Day is a global movement to end violence against women and girls that raises funds and awareness through benefit productions of Playwright/Founder Eve Ensler’s award winning play The Vagina Monologues. Through its international campaigns, the movement has informed millions about the issue, and has reopened shelters and funded thousands of community-based anti-violence programs and safe-houses around the world.

City of Joy: New hope for Congo’s brutalised women (The Guardian)

By Katharine Viner

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/09/city-of-joy-congo-women-rape

Eastern Congo is the rape capital of the world and the worst place on earth to be a woman. Katharine Viner reports on a radical new centre that promises its citizens a better future.

Women builders were part of the team that constructed City of Joy. At the opening ceremony they danced with bricks on their heads. Photograph: Paula Allen

Jeanne is 27, with a round face that makes her look younger, but she struggles on to the stage. She finds walking difficult, ever since she was tied to a tree and gang raped for many weeks, had surgery to repair the damage, went home and was raped again. She became pregnant during one of the attacks and was forced to give birth in the company of the militias; the baby died. Jeanne finally escaped to the Panzi hospital in Bukavu, at the eastern edge of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She has had repeated operations on her desecrated lower body. She looks small, shy, defeated.

But then this woman, a victim of the biggest horror story of modern times, in one of Africa’s largest countries, steps up to the microphone and starts to speak.

“When you look at me, what do you see?” she asks, with the bold delivery of the born orator, the preacher, the leader. “Do you see me as an animal? Because you are letting animals treat me like one. You, the government, if it was your children, would you stop it? You, you white people: if this violence was happening in your country, would you end it?” She speaks with the kind of fury and focus rarely seen in western politics. Hundreds of other survivors of sexual violence in the audience cheer wildly.

Jeanne (who has requested her last name be withheld for her protection) is not the only speaker here at the opening of City of Joy, a centre for survivors of rape in Bukavu. There is the founder, the New York playwright, author of The Vagina Monologues and activist Eve Ensler. There is Obama’s ambassador for women and girls, a prominent congresswoman, someone from the UN. But it is Jeanne who steals the show. And this is the premise on which the centre is founded: that even the most traumatised and brutalised people need not be mere passive recipients of foreign aid, but can in fact become political leaders.

For more than a decade, eastern Congo has become infamous as the “rape capital of the world” and the “worst place on earth to be a woman”. The UN has confirmed these facts. Half a million women, perhaps many more, have been raped since 1998, and in particularly brutal ways. And one response has been the building of City of Joy, a haven where survivors of gender violence who have healed physically (not always straightforward) live for six months and are educated. It is the product of a shared vision that the women don’t just need help, they need power. “Eve asked us what we wanted,” says Jeanne, the orator. “And we said: shelter. A roof. A place where we can be safe. And a place where we can be powerful. That’s what we now have.” Jeanne, and women like her, hope to change Congo for good.

The grand opening of City Of Joy, in February, is a big party: survivors in celebration clothes dance and sing and bang drums. Some, very badly injured, are carried in. Women who helped construct City of Joy dance with bricks balanced on their heads. Local men taking a stand against sexual violence – the “V-men” (after Ensler’s feminist V-Day movement) – make themselves visible with special T-shirts. American donors join a conga line. Women from the stage speak not just of rape but about laws that discriminate against women, the lack of free HIV treatment, what happens to the children of rape. There’s a lot of hugging, but the atmosphere is fierce.

The centre’s story begins in 1999, when the gynaecologist Denis Mukwege, of Bukavu’s Panzi hospital, rang his friend Christine Schuler-Deschryver, a human rights worker in the town. He said he had started to see injuries he had never seen before – women who had been raped in terrible ways, whose reproductive organs had been wrecked, who were suffering from fistulas between the vagina and rectum inflicted not just by gang rape but also by attacks with sticks, guns, bottles. “I said to Christine, this is new,” he recalls. “Their vaginas are destroyed. I couldn’t understand what was going on.”

Everyone in Bukavu knows Christine – she is 6ft without heels (and she’s never without heels), mixed race (her father was from a family of Belgian colonisers, her mother a Congolese servant in the tea fields of his plantation), dramatic, demanding. “When Dr Mukwege told me about these injuries, we were very afraid,” she says. “And then, in 2000, I was in my office when a woman ran in with a baby girl, 18 months old, her legs both broken back – the baby had been raped. She died in my car on the way to Panzi hospital. I ran into the cathedral with the dead baby in my arms, shouting at God. And that was the day I became a radical fighter.”

Bukavu is a ragged, devastated town built on the banks of Lake Kivu in the east of Congo; at one time the Belgian colonisers tried to make it a lakeside retreat, so stunning is the setting. There are no roads, so when it rains the pathways turn to mud. Women (rarely men) stagger beneath gigantic sacks of cassava and charcoal; they sit on the ground with a single tomato to sell. Once a town of 50,000, it is now home to hundreds of thousands, most of whom have fled fighting in the bush to come to the comparative safety of the city.

Congo is the size of all of western Europe, with a very weak state. It is also the poorest country on earth, by GDP, and yet one of the richest in terms of resources – the fertile soil that produces such a lush landscape and juicy avocados brings with it gold, diamonds and precious minerals, with criminals, militia and kleptocrat politicians not far behind. Since colonialism, when King Leopold II of Belgium ran a notoriously genocidal regime in order to plunder Congo’s rubber, armies have tried to grab its wealth. President Mobutu, who renamed Congo Zaire and stole a personal fortune of billions, showed that it wasn’t only outsiders who could get in on the act. Today’s gold rush is over coltan – Congo has 80% of Africa’s reserves of the mineral, which is used in mobile phones, laptops, iPads; with the resource in such demand, there’s a direct link between the technology consumer boom and the fighting in Congo.

Rape is a feature of war, and is often seen as an inevitability – the second world war general George Patton wrote that “there would unquestionably be some raping”. But it is more widespread and more violent in some wars than others. According to Joanna Bourke, author of Rape: A History, its prevalence depends on how violent a society is already; the disparities between men and women in the culture; whether soldiers fear any kind of punishment for rape; and the extent to which the values that enable mass rape are shared by men on each side of the conflict. On every count, Congo rates disastrously. And there’s also a particular problem, what Jean-Claude Kibala, the deputy governor of South Kivu, describes as a “bomb in the middle of society”: former child soldiers. “Nobody has a programme for how to deal with them,” he says. He tells of a bodyguard who kept falling asleep during the day. “The bodyguard explained, ‘When I was a child I was forced to bury a man who was still alive. This image is with me every night and I can’t sleep in darkness.’ There are people like that all through our society. Destruction and rape are destroying all humanity in the province.”

The particular brand of brutality that emerged in eastern Congo in the late 1990s has its roots in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when 800,000 Tutsis and some Hutus were murdered in three months by Hutu gangs known as the interahamwe (what they call themselves) or genocidaires (what their opponents call them). When the genocide was stopped by the arrival of the Tutsi exile-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, the interahamwe fled to eastern Congo where they established gigantic refugee camps in Goma, a town close to the Rwandan border. Notoriously, the global aid community responded to the refugee crisis with an efficiency that was missing from the response to the mass slaughter of the Tutsis: they fed, clothed and inoculated the genocidaires and their followers, while the few Tutsi survivors mourned their families and scrabbled around for food. The interahamwe who did not take up Rwandan president Paul Kagame’s offer to return home disappeared into the Congolese bush.

The Rwandan genocide was, in the words of French writer Jean Hatzfeld, “enthusiastic processions of ordinary people who every day went singing off to work as killers”. Neighbours and friends went out “hunting” Tutsis with farming implements such as machetes and hoes. But it wasn’t straightforward murder. As interahamwe leader Adalbert Munzigura told Hatzfeld in A Time For Machetes: “They needed intoxication, like someone who calls louder and louder for a bottle. Animal death no longer gave them satisfaction, they felt frustrated when they simply struck down a Tutsi. They wanted seething excitement. They felt cheated when a Tutsi died without a word. Which is why they no longer struck at the mortal parts, wishing to savour the blows and relish the screams.”

It was these very interahamwe who imposed themselves on the Congolese people, later reinvented as a militia called the FDLR (Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda). And over more than a decade of violence, in which power passed from Laurent Kabila to his son Joseph, Rwanda invaded Congo, there was Africa’s “first world war”, which was played out in Congo (involving Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Zimbabwe, Angola, Chad, Namibia and Sudan, and leaving an estimated 5.4 million dead, according to the International Rescue Committee); through all of this, a multitude of new and primarily Congolese rebel militias were formed, and all of them raped women with extreme violence. Which is why Dr Mukwege started to see injuries he’d never seen before.

Rape, devastating everywhere, particularly undermines Congolese society. After being raped a woman is usually excluded by her family and so, when women have the babies and do all the cooking, farming, carrying, community is quickly undermined. Society breaks down. “If you destroy women, you destroy the Congo,” Ensler says. “Raping women is the cheapest and most effective way to instil fear in and humiliate a community. It doesn’t even cost a bullet.”

But is there something deeper at work? Has the epidemic mass rape in Congo got something to do with the country’s own history, the result of many years of subjugation, played back? Michela Wrong in her book In The Footsteps Of Mr Kurtz memorably describes Congo’s population as being “marinated in humiliation”. Says Ensler: “There is so much rape in men who’ve been colonised and enslaved. You have to wonder what it’s done to these men, to their collective psychological memory.” The Belgian colonists were famous for cutting off hands and feet, still a common rebel tactic – Jeanne was forced to watch as her uncle’s hands and feet were cut off before he was murdered. Says Ensler: “Centuries of colonialism, slavery and exploitation by the west have come together and are now being delivered on the bodies of the Congolese, most dramatically on the bodies of women.”

The particularly violent way of rape that has become current destroys the women’s reproductive organs. They can no longer have children (especially terrible in a society in which motherhood so defines being female that the word for “woman” is “mama”). As Mukwege, who has worked for more than two decades with women on the ground in eastern Congo, says, “This will be the destruction of the Congolese people. If you destroy enough wombs, there will be no children. So then you come right in and take the minerals.” Here in Congo, in the heart of Africa, home of the origin of man, the rapist wants to stop the human race for good. I was told of a woman being raped who asked the rapist why he was doing it. He replied, “Because I’m already dead.” Not for nothing does Ensler describe Congo as “ground zero”.

The raped women I spoke to have a straightforward request for how to solve the problem of rape in Congo: get the FDLR (the genocidaires and their descendants) out of the country. A common Congolese refrain is that “rape is not in our culture” – ie, foreign warlords brought it with them – and certainly, returning the FDLR to Rwanda would be a start, as would Rwanda taking responsibility for the other militias in the area it supports.

But it is now much more widespread: brutalised mass rape has become so endemic that the Congolese army, much more populous than the FDLR, reportedly commits most of the attacks. Rape has become normalised – and is only one, dramatic, dimension of a far wider violence taking place throughout the region. “Rape in Congo has tended to attract the headlines,” says Carina Tertsakian of Human Rights Watch. “There are also other serious abuses: killings of civilians, arbitrary arrests and widespread looting are all commonplace.”

But something is changing. In February, lieutenant colonel Kibibi Mutware and three other Congolese army officers were convicted of crimes against humanity for ordering rape and other crimes in Fizi town, South Kivu, on New Year’s Day this year. They were sentenced to 20 years in prison. This is truly a landmark – the first time a senior ranking Congolese army officer has been arrested, tried and convicted for rape crimes. But one case is hardly enough: there has been no action taken against other officers accused of similar crimes also committed that same day, the mass rape of 39 women and one girl in Bushani and Kalambiro villages in North Kivu. And, as Ensler asks: “Will they keep the lieutenant colonel in jail?” But it is, at least, something.

The women of Congo have been hopeful before. Since the late 90s, they have been intermittently fashionable as a global cause in the west; an activist wryly noted that every 18 months or so there’s a flurry of media interest, gruesome rape stories are related, each more terrible than the last, and then there’s silence. “They come and visit,” Schuler-Deschryver says bitterly, “and leave me with a pile of business cards.” Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, visited in 2009. “I made Hillary cry when she came, and it made me full of hope. But then – nothing.”

Melanne Verveer, who, in a new role created by Obama, is the US ambassador for women and girls, and who attended the opening of City of Joy, denies that the Clinton visit was followed by no extra money; her aides fluster around me proffering sheets of numbers, proclaiming cash provided ($42m over five years, they say). But Congo is clearly not a priority for international aid: when Ensler went to talk to Michelle Obama about the cause, she got inside the White House before an aide, high up in the Obama administration, informed her that “Congo was not going to be part of the Michelle brand”. It is notable that, despite the enormous hope raised in Africa when Obama was elected, both his predecessors, George W Bush and Bill Clinton, showed more interest in the continent.

Although the money for City of Joy is provided by Ensler’s movement V-Day (which raises cash through performances of The Vagina Monologues), plus Unicef and various foundations and donors, all are keen to emphasise that the project is owned and led by Congolese women. And their big idea is not aid, but empowerment. If we accept that rape is a violent expression of the power imbalance between men and women, then you prevent rape by helping women get more power. In other words, the City of Joy is all about a Congolese kind of feminism.

The programme will be run by Bahati Bachu, a strong-looking woman who carries an air of disbelief that this City of Joy is happening at all, and is a living, breathing rebuttal to those who imagine that feminism does not exist in developing countries. She is 58 (a good age in Congo, where life expectancy is 53) and a longtime women’s rights activist, a tough role to take in this harsh place. For international women’s day in 1999, she asked all the women in Bukavu to stay indoors; they did, and the entire town shut down. She was sacked from her role as regional women’s officer as a result. She once threatened to walk bare-breasted through the streets as a protest against women’s place in society. “When the rapes started to happen, I denounced it everywhere,” she says. “Germany, France. And nothing. I worked for so many years for Congolese women, but eventually I stopped because I was discouraged. But now, with City of Joy, I am seeing the fruit of my work, and others want to join. I will not die before we have a revolution.” She does not laugh at this.

Mama Bachu’s programme lasts six months. Survivors have “de-traumatisation” sessions; they learn about women’s rights (“Some are shocked to hear they have any rights at all,” Bachu says), literacy, the economy, accounting, farming, production, business, self-defence, the internet. (Google has donated a £100k technology centre.) Says Schuler-Deschryver, “Everything is Congolese, not American. So there’s no therapy, talking about your relationship with your father.” The women asked for small brick houses, arranged like a village, and a place for exercise, “so we can use up our energy and not row in the evenings”.

Sixty women will live here for six months, passed on from the gynaecology ward at Panzi hospital, after Dr Mukwege has saved their lives. They come from all over Congo. As the Congolese ambassador to the US, Faudi Mitfu, says, “City of Joy shows that even when a woman has been terribly tortured, she can still stand and build.” And, perhaps more hopefully: “Today we build City of Joy. Tomorrow we build our country.”

It’s almost unbelievable that the poorest country on earth could give birth to a women’s movement, just like the incongruousness of the beautiful landscape with the horrific past and present; the terrible damaged lives with the singing and dancing. It’s got to have a chance. As Schuler-Deschryver says, “There’s something you need to know about Congolese women. When we can’t walk, we run.”

NEW: Expanded Paula Allen Photo Gallery of City of Joy!

V-Day is pleased to launch the City of Joy Opening Ceremony Photo Gallery, by world-renowned photojournalist and long-time V-Day activist Paula Allen.

This incredible collection of images invites all of our activists into the momentous occasion that was the opening ceremony for City of Joy, a revolutionary new community for women survivors of gender violence in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo.

City of Joy celebrated its opening on February 4th. The event brought thousands of Congolese women and men, grassroots activists, regional dignitaries, City of Joy residents and staff together with national and international activists, politicians, and supporters.

We invite you to view and share this extensive and beautiful selection of images.

VIEW City of Joy Opening Ceremony Photo Gallery >

LEARN More About the Opening of City of Joy >

DONATE >

Listen to Interview with Eve on CBC Radio “The Current”

http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2011/04/04/eve-ensler/

Eve Ensler

Eve Ensler is best known for writing The Vagina Monologues. She’s also a cancer survivor … a tireless champion of women in war zones and a woman of remarkable perspective. We talk to Eve Ensler about her efforts to changing the perception of victimhood and empowering battered women in Congo to Live Life to the fullest.

Listen to Part Three: (Pop-up)

PART THREE

Eve Ensler

*** A warning this segment contains frank talk about a disturbing subject that may not be suitable for children ***

We started this segment with a reading from Eve Ensler, a powerful speech she gave earlier this year at a women’s conference. Eve Ensler who is best known for writing The Vagina Monologues. She says her cancer is gone but as she said as difficult as that was.. what has made her most ill is what she knows about the Democratic Republic of Congo. A place where rape, mutilation, and the murder of women are devastatingly rampant.

Several weeks ago, Ensler’s foundation V-Day opened the doors of City of Joy… a safe haven outside Bukavu, Congo for women who are survivors of violence. Eve Ensler was in New York.

Eve Ensler is the author of The Vagina Monologues. Her new book is I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Lives of Girls Around the World. Her foundation is called V-Day at VDay.org.

Related Links:

• My cancer is arbitrary. Congo’s atrocities are very deliberate By Eve Ensler – The Guardian
• V-Day Congo: Ensler Builds ‘City of Joy’ for Rape Victims – Video
• “Vagina Monologues” author opens safe haven for young women fleeing circumcision, forced marriage By Matthew J. Rosenberg – Associated Press
• Playwright/activist Eve Ensler keynote speaker for 2011 East Bay Women’s Conference By Patrick Brown – Contra Costa Times

LISTEN: Eve Ensler’s interview on WBEZ’s ‘Eight Forty-Eight’ show (WBEZ)

http://www.wbez.org/eight-forty-eight/2011-04-07

Playwright and activist Eve Ensler is committed to sharing the stories of women – whether they’re full of joy or pain. The Vagina Monologues tackles women’s struggles with issues ranging from body image to rape. Ensler is also an activist. Her V-Day movement works to stop violence against girls and women around the globe.

Ensler will be in Chicago on April 10 to talk about her latest book: I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World. The book’s a guide that encourages girls to be their best selves.

Host Alison Cuddy spoke with Ensler while she was still in New York. She began by asking why she’s focused on girls’ emotional sides.

Ensler will read, discuss and sign copies of her book I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World Sunday, April 10, at the International House at the University of Chicago.

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Eve Awarded the 2011 Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award!

This just in!

V-Day Founder and Artistic Director Eve Ensler awarded the 2011 Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award!

Eve will receive the 2011 Isabelle Stevenson Award, which recognizes an individual from the theater community who has made a substantial contribution of volunteered time and effort on behalf of humanitarian, social service or charitable organizations. The award was chosen by the Tony Awards Administration Committee and Eve will be presented the award at the Tony ceremony on June 12.

Congratulations Eve!!!!

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The American Theatre Wing’s Antoinette Perry “Tony” Awards® are presented by
The Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing

www.tonyawards.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tony Awards press contact: Slate PR, (646) 360-1320
Shawn Purdy/Shea Martin/Lindsey Brown

Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre,

Isabelle Stevenson Award and

Tony Honors for Excellence in the Theatre

New York, New York (April 6, 2011) – The Tony Awards® Administration Committee has announced this year’s recipients for the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, the Isabelle Stevenson Award and The Tony Honors for Excellence in the Theatre. These awards will be presented at the 2011 Tony Awards on Sunday, June 12th. The 2011 Tony Awards are presented by The Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing.

The Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre will be presented to two outstanding individuals, playwright Athol Fugard and Philip J. Smith, Chairman of The Shubert Organization.

Athol Fugard was born in 1932 in Middelburg, in the Karoo desert region of South Africa, and has battled to bring the stories of all South Africans to the world, even under apartheid. Mr. Fugard has been working in the theatre as a playwright, director and actor since the mid-fifties in South Africa, England and the United States. His plays include The Train Driver, No-Good Friday, Non-Gogo, Blood Knot, Hello and Goodbye, People Are Living There, Boesman and Lena, Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act, Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, Dimetos, The Island, A Lesson From Aloes, “MASTER HAROLD”…and the boys, The Road to Mecca, A Place With the Pigs, My Children! My Africa!, Playland, Valley Song, The Captain’s Tiger, Sorrows & Rejoicings, Exits and Entrances, Victory and Coming Home. He has been on stage in South Africa, London, Broadway, Off-Broadway and regional theatres in the U.S. Film credits include The Road to Mecca, Gandhi, The Killing Fields, Meeting with Remarkable Men, Marigolds in August, Boesman and Lena and The Guest. He has written one novel, Tsotsi, a film version of which was made in South Africa and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, as well as the Michael Powell Award and the Standard Life Audience Award at the 2005 Edinburgh Film Festival, the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival, and the Audience Award at the Los Angeles AFIFilm Festival. Mr. Fugard is a playwright whose art has always spoken out against racism, and continues to be an active voice for freedom and equality.

Philip J. Smith began his Shubert career more than 50 years ago as a box office treasurer; steadily moving up the ranks to serve as President from 1996 – 2008 and is now the Chairman of the Shubert Organization. The Shubert Organization has been in the forefront of the American Theatre since the beginning of the 20th century and directs the management and operation of 17 Broadway theatres in New York City, as well as theatres in Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Mr. Smith’s innovations during his career have included the computerization of all Shubert box offices and the development of Telecharge, the industry’s most successful system for purchasing tickets. He sits on the Executive Committee of The Broadway League’s Board of Governors and is a member of the Labor Committee, as well as a member of the Tony Awards Administration Committee on behalf of the League.He is an active Board member for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and The Actor’s Fund, for which he is the first Vice President. He is also a member of the Knights of Malta and the recipient of theEllis Island Medal of Honor.

The recipient of the Isabelle Stevenson Award will be V-Day founder and artistic director, Eve Ensler. The Isabelle Stevenson Award recognizes an individual from the theatre community who has made a substantial contribution of volunteered time and effort on behalf of one or more humanitarian, social service or charitable organizations, regardless of whether such organizations relate to the theatre. Ms. Ensler is a playwright, performer and activist and the award-winning author of The Vagina Monologues, which has been published in 48 languages and performed in over 140 countries. Eve’s newest work, I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life Of Girls Around The World, was released February 2010 in book form by Random House. and made The New York Times Best Seller list. A theatrical commercial tour will begin this summer in South Africa, moving to Paris and San Francisco, before moving to an Off-Broadway production. Ms. Ensler’s experience performing The Vagina Monologues inspired her to create V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. She has devoted her life to stopping violence, envisioning a planet in which women and girls will be free to thrive, rather than merely survive. Today, V-Day is a global activist movement that raises funds and awareness throughbenefit productions of Ms. Ensler’s award winning play The Vagina Monologues and other artistic works. In 2011, over 5,400 V-Day benefits took place, and to date, the V-Day movement has raised over $80 million and educated millions about the issue of violence against women and the efforts to end it, crafted international educational, media and PSA campaigns, opened the revolutionary City of Joy community in the Democratic Republic of Congo, launched the Karama program in the Middle East, reopenedshelters, and funded over 12,000 community-based anti-violence programs andsafe houses in Haiti, Kenya, South Dakota, Egypt and Iraq. In the summer of 2010, Eve’s newest play Here was filmed live by Sky Television in London, UK. Eve’s other plays include Necessary Targets, The Treatment and The Good Body, which she performed on Broadway, followed by a national tour. V-Day is a remarkable example of transforming theatrical success into an effort to truly change people’s lives worldwide.

The Tony Honors for Excellence in the Theatre were established in 1990 and are awarded annually to institutions, individuals and/or organizations that have demonstrated extraordinary achievement in theatre, but are not eligible in any of the established Tony Award categories. This year’s Tony Honors will be presented to:

• Bill Berloni: Mr. Berloni’s career as an animal trainer began over 32 years ago, finding and training “Sandy” for the original Broadway production of Annie His animals have been part of more than a dozen Broadway productions including The Wizard of Oz, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Legally Blond, Camelot, Le Bête and Woman in White. He has also trained animals for two dozen Off-Broadway shows and more than 100 regional productions.
• The Drama Book Shop: For nearly a century The Drama Book Shop, on West 40th Street in Manhattan, has been an unwavering supporter of the theatre. Generations of theatre lovers have browsed the store’s seemingly endless shelves, finding hard-to-locate manuscripts, new works from theatres in other countries, and just-published copies of hit plays. The book shop includes a small black box theatre which is continuously used to present new works and seminars for the theatre community at no cost.
• Sharon Jensen and Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts: Since 1986, the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts has worked to achieve a theatre, film and television industry that reflects American society; where each artist is considered on his/her individual merits; where the stories being told are drawn from diverse experiences; and where our individual humanity can be celebrated. Towards this goal, the Alliance promotes diversity in programming and leadership, and balanced portrayals of persons of color and persons with disabilities.

The Tony Award Nominations will be announced on Tuesday, May 3rd. The Tony Nominations can be viewed LIVE (8:30am ET) in their entirety at www.TonyAwards.com. Follow the Tony Awards on Twitter for real-time updates on the nominees as they are announced (Twitter.com/TheTonyAwards). The entire announcement will be viewable on TonyAwards.com after the event as well.

The 65th Annual Tony Awards will be broadcast in a live three-hour ceremony from the Beacon Theatre on the CBS television network on Sunday, June 12, 2011. For more information on the Tony Awards, please visit www.TonyAwards.com.

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About the Tony Awards

The American Theatre Wing’s Tonys Awards are presented by The Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing. At The Broadway League, Paul Libin is Chairman and Charlotte St. Martin is Executive Director. At the American Theatre Wing, Theodore S. Chapin is Chairman and Howard Sherman is Executive Director. For Tony Award Productions, Alan Wasser and Allan Williams of Alan Wasser Associates are the General Managers. Ricky Kirshner and Glenn Weiss of White Cherry Entertainment are the Executive Producers of the 2011 Tony Awards. Mr. Weiss will also serve as Director of the 2011 Tony Awards.

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