In honor of Valentine’s Day I attended a benefit production of Eve Ensler’s award-winning play The Vagina Monologues. This year the V-day global campaign focus is “Stop Raping our Greatest Resource: Power to Women in the DRC.” Over 5.4 million people have died in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) since 1998 – currently 45,000 people die each month. Thousands of women experience brutal sexual violence on a daily basis. Thankfully journalists like Nicholas Kristof are keeping the DRC in the news – most recently with this moving video of a Message for President Obama. However, as one Congolese woman says, “we speak but nothing changes.” The Enough Project highlights how our demand for conflict minerals – the material in the cellphone in your pocket – fuels this deadly war. Congolese women and men risk their lives so we can talk on our cellphones, check our email and update our Facebook status. What will we do for them?

When this woman would not be quiet in the face of her perpetrators, they shot her three times. Photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

By asimoni
This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 10:21 am and is filed under Globalization, Women's Rights, asimoni. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.