Please Help

I know many of our family and friends read this blog, so I've decided to write a post here to bring everyone's attention to something so horrifying that I cannot help writing about it, and it must stop.

If you've been reading the news beyond the U.S. election & economic stuff, you may have seen headlines about the war going on in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (if not, click here, here, and here). This is a war that has been going on for 10 years and has some roots in the Rwandan genocide. Some estimates put the number of deaths resulting from this conflict at well over 5 million, which gives a sense of how terribly high the toll has been on civilians.

But death alone isn't the worst of it. Not surprisingly, women and girls in particular have been targeted by soldiers on both sides for the cruelest treatment imaginable, if it can even be imagined. The stories of rape (more appropriately just "torture") that are finally emerging from some communities are so sick that they will make your blood run cold for hours if you can bring yourself to read them. These women come from a culture where having been raped is shameful, so often victims stay silent and those who don't may be abandoned by their husbands and parents. Now that the number of women and girls who have experienced such unspeakable torment seems to have reached over 100,000, word of the immensity of this crisis is finally getting out. But still there is little hope that the monsters who perpetrate these assaults will be held accountable to anyone for their crimes, and so the attacks continue despite the "cease-fire" we are now reading about. It's so bad that even the clinics that have been set up to try to reconstruct the women's mutilated bodies have come under attack, where doctors are having to fight off drunken soldiers who want to preserve the damage they inflicted, rather than treat the thousands of women that need medical attention.

You may think this is really not appropriate content for a baby blog, but hearing about the conditions other women and girls live in has jolted me into realizing how lucky Sophie and I are to be protected from such horrors. I am so utterly grateful to be able to raise my daughter here, and not there, among people who care deeply for our well-being. That is what the Congolese women don't have: enough people who are horrified by what has happened to them, and who take action to prevent it. But they deserve it every bit as much as Sophie and I and all you other women out there.

Unfortunately, it doesn't feel like there is a whole lot one can do, but there are some small things that are better than nothing. First, you can raise awareness by telling people you know about this situation, which is what I'm trying to do here. Second, you can write letters to newspapers, to your representatives in Congress, and to world leaders including the President of the DRC. Encourage your representatives to pass the International Violence Against Women Act, which will commit U.S. money and brainpower, if nothing else, to addressing the atrocities in a number of countries including the DRC (petition Congress to pass the IVAWA, and petition the next president directly to come up with a viable plan using American resources). Third, you can donate to one of the organizations working on behalf of these women already, such as the International Committee for the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, and V-Day. You can navigate through the sites I've linked to in this paragraph to find out more information about what's happening, and to see more specifics about how you can get involved.

Thanks for reading. If you're compelled to take action, then my daughter and I thank you for trying to make the world a safer place to be a woman. I promise that next week the posts will return to cute baby talk, as usual.