a visual adaptation of Baraka's scathing and foreboding social commentary (music by The Roots.) Shot on three different types of film and two different types of video over three months with at least fifty actors/extras in about twenty-five locations in the West Philly area by one guy. (Bryan Green, 22, senior film & video major at Drexel University)
Ruminate Nonfiction Prize
Ruminate is thrilled to announce our first annual Ruminate Nonfiction Prize. The first place story will win a $500 prize and the runner-up will win a $50 prize. The entry deadline is February 1st, 2011 and the finalist judge is award-winning author, Al Haley. (Haley is the published author of Home Ground: Stories of Two Families and the Land and Exotic: A Novel, winner of the John Irving First Novel Award, and his work has been published in publications including The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly.) -The submission deadline for the prize is midnight February 1st, 2011.
Guidelines:
-The entry fee is $12 (includes a free copy of the Summer 2011 Issue, which will include the winning piece).
-You may submit one nonfiction piece per entry and it must be 7000 words or less. There is no limit on the number of entries per person.
-$500 and publication in the Spring 2011 Issue will be awarded to the winner. The runner-up will receive a $50 cash prize.
-A blind reading of all entries will be conducted by a panel of RUMINATE readers, who will select 8 nonfiction finalists.
-Close friends and students (current & former) of the judge, Al Haley, are not eligible to compete, nor are close friends of the RUMINATE staff.
-All submissions must be submitted via our online submission form below. We will not accept mail or email submissions. We do not accept previously published entries.
-All submissions must be previously unpublished.
-You may pay the entry fee online below or mail your payment.
-Winners will be announced in the Summer Issue, June 2011.
-We will be notifying all entrants of submission status in early April, 2011.
-Please remove your name, bio, and any contact info from the file that you submit.
Submission is a two-step process:
1. You must first pay the submission fee by selecting the "Pay Now" button below. A new window will open at the Paypal website where you can either pay by credit card (you do not need a Paypal account for this option), or with your Paypal account if you have one.
Nonfiction Entry Fee
and 1 Year Subscription-$30(Save $10 off the regular
subscription price with this
special offer.)Nonfiction Entry Fee-$12
2. After paying the submisison fee you can fill out the submission form and upload your story by selecting the link below.
Submission Form
*You may also pay by mail. Upload your work using the above submission form and then mail a check made payable to RUMINATE MAGAZINE, attention Nonfiction Prize at 140 N. Roosevelt Ave., Fort Collins, CO 80521. Along with your entry fee, please let us know the title of the piece you have submitted and make sure your entry fee is postmarked by February 1st, 2011.
Please Note: RUMINATE adheres to the following Contest Code of Ethics, as adopted by the Council of Literary Presses and Magazines, of which RUMINATE is a proud member: "CLMP's community of independent literary publishers believes that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. We believe that intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree to 1) conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical behavior on the part of our readers, judges, or editors; 2) to provide clear and specific contest guidelines -- defining conflict of interest for all parties involved; and 3) to make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public. This Code recognizes that different contest models produce different results, but that each model can be run ethically. We have adopted this Code to reinforce our integrity and dedication as a publishing community and to ensure that our contests contribute to a vibrant literary heritage."
Aspiring Author Contest
RSJ 2011 Aspiring Author Contest
Each year aspiring fiction authors take a step closer to having their dreams come true by entering the Romance Slam Jam Aspiring Author Contest. The winners’ manuscripts are read by an editor or agent with a chance at publication or representation.
Genre: Black Romance/Women’s Fiction
Eligibility: If you have not had a full-length novel published by a traditional publisher, you are eligible for this contest. Therefore, if your publishing credits are, short stories, novellas, eBooks, poetry, non-fiction and or you are self-published, you are eligible.
Registration is open: Contest registration formPrizes: The four winners will have their submission considered for publication by one of the below traditional publishers:
- Editor Esi Sogah from Harper Collins Publishers
- Editor Latoya Smith from Grand Central Publishing
- Editor Monique Patterson from St. Martin’s Press
- Editor Selena James from Kensington Books
We have four outstanding publishers who will be considering our winners’ submissions. The first place winner chooses who she/he wants to be considered by. The second place winner chooses who she/he wants to be considered by from the editors left. The third place winner chooses who she/he wants to be considered by from the last two editors left. The fourth place winner’s submission will be considered for publication by the remaining publisher.
Submission Package:
To help prepare contestants for submitting to publishing houses and agents, the entries will resemble a submission package sent to agents and publishers. Submissions are electronic (sent via email). The submission should be Microsoft Word documents. In the body of the email, be sure to give the name you registered in the contest under and the title of your novel.Format:
- 1 inch margins all around
- Font Times New Roman, 12pt
Include (one email, 3-4 attachments):
- 1 page query letter single spaced addressed to:
Ms. C. Judge
2 Busy St.
New York, NY, 10101
Sign it Contestant.
- Your query letter may be the body of the email or an attachment.
- Synopsis double spaced (3 page max).
- 15 sample pages double spaced.
Cover page (this page does not count toward your 15 sample pages)
In the manuscript header, place the Novel Title / Author and Page Number
If you need an extra page or two to complete a scene, that’s okay.- Contest registration form if you have not already submitted it.
Important Dates: All submissions must be received by 28 February 2011. The winners will be announced at the Emma Awards Banquet during RSJ 2011. Winners not in attendance at the the Emma Awards will be notified by email the first week of May 2011.Contest Fee:
Please make a $30 money order or cashiers check payable to: Romance Slam JamMail payment and RSJ Aspiring Author Registration Form to:
Romance Slam Jam
c/o Deatri King-Bey
P.O. Box 822
Tolleson, AZ 85353If you’d like to pay using PayPal, the fee is $35. Email payment and registration form to rsjdeatri at yahoo dot com
Once payment and the Contest Registration Form have been received, instructions will be emailed to you on where to send the submission.
Please note: Registration fee is non-refundable.
Refer any questions regarding the Romance Slam Jam Aspiring Authors contest to rsjdeatri at yahoo dot com
Good Luck!
Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition
Honors Emerging WritersWhen Lorian Hemingway judged Hemingway Days’ first short story competition in 1981, she and her fellow judges sat in a Lower Keys cottage reading and evaluating the few dozen entries with care. They couldn’t possibly imagine that the competition would grow into one of America’s most prestigious literary contests.
Director and Final Judge
Lorian Hemingway
Photograph by: Tom Corcoran
Now, more than a quarter-century later, the contest draws between 800 and 1100 entries each year from around the U.S. and other countries as far-flung as India and Romania — and Lorian and her small judging panel still give every one of them their complete attention and respect.
Since its beginnings, the competition has been dedicated to recognizing and supporting the work of emerging writers whose fiction has not yet achieved success. For some, this recognition is the first validation of their worth as writers.
Coordinating the competition is a pleasure and a passion for Lorian, author of three critically acclaimed books, Walking Into The River, Walk On Water and A World Turned Over. “Reading a story of talent and craft, and knowing that perhaps you can help further the career of a gifted writer, is truly one of the greatest joys,” says Lorian. “I consider it my job to honor the talent of emerging writers—and if those who enter this competition are compelled to continue to write as a result of receiving the recognition they so deserve, then we are each richer for it.”
The longtime judging panel includes writer Cristen Hemingway Jaynes as well as editor and award-winning short story writer Jeff Baker.
* * *
$2,500 Awaits Winners of Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition
Writers of short fiction are encouraged to enter the 2011 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. The competition has a thirty-year history of literary excellence, and its organizers are dedicated to enthusiastically supporting the efforts and talent of emerging writers of short fiction whose voices have yet to be heard.
Lorian Hemingway, granddaughter of Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway, is the author of three critically acclaimed books:Walking into the River, Walk on Water, and A World Turned Over.
Ms. Hemingway is the competition’s final judge.
Prizes:
The first-place winner will receive $1,500. The second and third-place winners will receive $500 each. Honorable mentions will also be awarded to entrants whose work demonstrates promise.
Eligibility requirements for our 2011 competition are as follows:What to submit:
• Stories must be original unpublished fiction, typed and double-spaced, and may not exceed 3,500 words in length. We have extended our word limit for the first time in thirty years to 3,500 words rather than 3,000. There are no theme or genre restrictions. Copyright remains property of the author.Who may submit:
• The literary competition is open to all U.S. and international writers whose fiction has not appeared in a nationally distributed publication with a circulation of 5,000 or more. Writers who have been published by an online magazine or who have self-published will be considered on an individual basis.Submission requirements:
• Submissions may be sent via regular mail or submitted online. Please visit our online submissions page for complete instructions regarding online submissions. Writers may submit multiple entries, but each must be accompanied by an entry fee and separate cover sheet. We do accept simultaneous submissions; however, the writer must notify us if a story is accepted for publication or wins an award prior to our July announcements. No entry confirmation will be given unless requested. No SASE is required.
• The author’s name should not appear on the story. Our entrants are judged anonymously. Each story must be accompanied by a separate cover sheet with the writer's name, complete mailing address, e-mail address, phone number, the title of the piece, and the word count. Manuscripts will not be returned. These requirements apply for online submissions as well.
Deadlines and Entry Fees:
• The entry fee is $15 for each story postmarked by May 1, 2011. The late entry fee is $20 for each story postmarked by May 15, 2011. We encourage you to enter by May 1 if at all possible, but please know that your story will still be accepted if you meet the later deadline. Entries postmarked after May 15, 2011 will not be accepted. Entries submitted online after May 15, 2011 will not be accepted. Writers may submit for the 2012 competition beginning May 16, 2011.
How to pay your entry fee:
• Entry fees submitted by mail with their accompanying stories may be paid -- in U.S. funds -- via a personal check, cashier’s check, or money order. Please make checks payable to LHSSC or The Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition. Entry fees for online submissions may be paid with PayPal.
Announcement of Winners and Honorable Mentions:
Winners will be announced at the end of July 2011 in Key West, Florida, and posted on our website soon afterward. Only the first-place entrant will be notified personally. All entrants will receive a letter from Lorian Hemingway and a list of winners, either via regular mail or e-mail, by October 1, 2011.
All manuscripts and their accompanying entry fees should be sent to The Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, P.O. Box 993, Key West, FL 33041 or submitted online.
For more information, please explore this website or e-mail: shortstorykw@gmail.com"> shortstorykw@gmail.com
For the New Yorker, Women Are Invisible:
Ms Magazine Pushes Protest
January 15, 2011
Last week, Anne Hays put her latest copy of the New Yorker back in the mail, with a note explaining that the august publication owed her a refund for putting out the second issue in a row featuring almost no pieces by women. In December's New Yorker content by women made up only three pages of the magazine's 150; January's contained only two items by women, a poem and a brief "Shouts and Murmers" item.
"I am baffled, outraged, saddened, and a bit depressed that, though some would claim our country’s sexism problem ended in the late ’60s, the most prominent and respected literary magazine in the country can’t find space in its pages for women’s voices in the year 2011," wrote Hays in the letter, promising to send back every issue containing fewer than five female bylines. "You tend to publish 13 to 15 writers in each issue; five women shouldn’t be that hard," she concluded.
Her letter, posted to Facebook and widely circulated last week, has prompted Ms. magazine to start an online petition reminding the magazine's editors that there are in fact lots of women in the world and that many of them write feature articles, reviews and poems, and that the premier literary/current events magazine in the country should reflect that fact.
"Publications as prominent as the New Yorker need to know they can't get away with gender inequity in bylines. This isn't one of those examples of insidious, difficult-to-measure sexism. They will get caught by anyone who can count!" said Jessica Stite, online editor at Ms.
Ms. senior editor Michele Kort told AlterNet that although the New Yorker has showcased many talented female writers over the years, it needs to do way better to ensure equal representation on a regular basis, "Obviously David Remnick, great editor that he is, can bring a greater percentage of women to the fore in the publiation. The New Yorker can only offer a richer perspective on the world if it includes more women’s voices.”
Of course, the New Yorker is not the only publication on earth that falls consistently short of reaching gender parity in its pages. In a Jezebel post about Hays' letter Jenna Sauers did a count of female writers in other current event and literary publications. January's issue of Harpers has only three out of 21 stories by women. The Nation's latest print issue has four and a half female bylines out of 17 articles. The Atlantic did a little better, featuring five and a half female bylines, of 18 total stories.
The OpEd project, which tracks the ratio of male to female bylines across publications, shows these depressing results for December 24 or December 31, the last week they gathered data: New York Times: 18 percent women, 82 percent men; Washington Post: 16 percent, 84 percent; Salon: 15 percent, 85 percent; Huffington Post: 25 percent, 75 percent; Daily Beast: 35 percent, 65 percent.
These ratios come up in every area of journalism and publishing. From the political blogosphere to cable news shows, men drastically outnumber women as commentators, pundits and reporters. In 2003 the American Journalist Survey found that the percent of female reporters was roughly the same as in 1983: only 33 percent. A 2008 report by Media Matters looking at the ratio of conservative to progressive columnists revealed that only about one third of the top 100 syndicated columnists are women. Sixty-seven percent of bloggers are men, according to a 2009 Technorati report highlighted by Mother Jones.
There are plenty of complex reasons behind the shortage of female bylines in journalism, and editors and publications use many of them as excuses when they're called out for their lack of diversity. (The lack of gender diversity is only part of the problem -- writers of color, and writers across status and class, are also severely underrepresented.) But an important first step of the solution is for publications to at least be conscious of the issue, and make an effort to address it by actively cultivating female talent and even pledging to including a certain number of female bylines per issue. Hopefully Hays' letter and the Ms. petition will get the New Yorker to pay attention from now on.
Tana Ganeva is an AlterNet editor. Follow her on Twitter. You can email her at tanaalternet@gmail.com.
Africa's Chess Progidy,
Phiona Mutesi
Game of her life
For 14-year-old chess progidy Phiona Mutesi, chess is a lifeline
Stephanie SinclairShe's 14, lives in the slums of Uganda and is just now learning to read. But Phiona Mutesi's instincts have made her a player to watch in international chess.
This story appears in the January 10, 2011, issue of ESPN The Magazine.
SHE FLIES TO Siberia in late September with nine teammates, all in their 20s, much older than she is. When she won the match that put her on this plane she had no idea what it meant. Nobody had told her what was at stake, so she just played, like always. She had no idea that she'd qualified for the Olympiad; no idea what the Olympiad was. She had no idea that her win would send her to the city of Khanty-Mansiysk, in remote Russia; no idea where Russia was. When she learned all this, she asked just one question: "Is it cold there?"
But here she is, journeying with her countrymen 27 hours across the globe. And though she has known many of them for a few years, they have no idea where she is from or where she aspires to go, because Phiona Mutesi is from a place where girls like her don't talk about that.
AGAPE CHURCH COULD collapse at any moment. It is a ramshackle structure that lists alarmingly to one side, held together by scrap wood, rope, a few nails and faith. It is rickety, like everything else around it. At the church on this Saturday morning in September are 37 children whose lives are equally fragile. They wander in to play a game none had heard of before they met Coach Robert, a game so foreign that there's no word for it in Luganda, their native language.
Chess.
When they walk through the door, grins crease their faces. This is home as much as any place, a refuge, the only community they know. These are their friends, their brothers and sisters of chess, and there is relative safety and comfort here. Inside Agape church it is almost possible to forget the chaos outside, in Katwe, the largest of eight slums in Kampala, Uganda, and one of the worst places on earth.
There are only seven chessboards at the church, and chess pieces are so scarce that sometimes an orphan pawn must stand in for a king. A child sits on each end of a wobbly pew, both straddling the board between their knobby knees, with captured pieces guarded in their laps. A 5-year-old kid in a threadbare Denver Broncos No. 7 jersey competes against an 11-year-old in a frayed T-shirt that reads "J'Adore Paris." Most of the kids are barefoot. Some wear flip-flops. One has on black wing tips with no laces.
It is rapid-fire street chess. When more than a few seconds elapse without a move, there is a palpable restlessness. It is remarkably quiet except for the thud of one piece slaying another and the occasional dispute over the location of a piece on a chessboard so faded that the dark spaces are barely distinguishable from the light ones. Surrender is signaled by a clattering of captured pieces on the board. A new match begins immediately without the slightest celebration.
Coach Robert Katende is here. So are Benjamin and Ivan and Brian. And up near the pulpit sits Phiona. One of two girls in the room, Phiona is juggling three matches at once and dominating them with her aggressive style, checkmating her young opponents while drawing a flower in the dirt on the floor with her toe. Phiona is 14, and her stone face gives no sign that the next day she will travel to Siberia to compete against the very best chess players in the world.
ICE? THE OPENING CEREMONIES at the 2010 Chess Olympiad take place in an ice arena. Phiona has never seen ice. There are also lasers and dancers inside bubbles and people costumed as chess pieces marching around on a giant chessboard. Phiona watches it all with her hands cupping her cheeks, as if in a wonderland. She asks if this happens every night in this place, and she is told by her coach no, the arena normally serves as a home for hockey, concerts and the circus. Phiona has never heard of those things.
She returns to the hotel, which at 15 floors is the tallest building Phiona has ever entered. She rides the elevator with trepidation. She stares out of her room window amazed by how people on the ground look so tiny from the sixth floor. She takes a long shower, washing away the slum.
PHIONA MUTESI IS the ultimate underdog. To be African is to be an underdog in the world. To be Ugandan is to be an underdog in Africa. To be from Katwe is to be an underdog in Uganda. And finally, to be female is to be an underdog in Katwe.
She wakes at 5 each morning to begin a two-hour trek through Katwe to fill a jug with drinkable water, walking through lowland that is often so severely flooded by Uganda's torrential rains that many residents sleep in hammocks near their ceilings to avoid drowning. There are no sewers, and the human waste from downtown Kampala is dumped directly into the slum. There is no sanitation. Flies are everywhere. The stench is appalling.
Stephanie SinclairIts roof is listing and its walls are crumbling. But when the doors to Agape Sanctuary are unlocked, the children of Katwe find religion in chess.Phiona walks past dogs, rats and long-horned cattle, all competing with her to survive in a cramped space that grows more crowded every minute. She navigates carefully through this place where women are valued for little more than sex and childcare, where 50 percent of teen girls are mothers. It is a place where everybody is on the move but nobody ever leaves; it is said that if you are born in Katwe you die in Katwe, from disease or violence or neglect. Whenever Phiona gets scared on these journeys, she thinks of another test of survival. "Chess is a lot like my life," she says through an interpreter. "If you make smart moves you can stay away from danger, but you know any bad decision could be your last."
Phiona and her family have relocated inside Katwe six times in four years, once because all of their possessions were stolen, another time because their hut was crumbling. Their current home is a 10-foot-by-10-foot room, its only window covered by sheet metal. The walls are brick, the roof corrugated tin held up by spindly wood beams. A curtain is drawn across the doorway when the door is open, as it always is during the sweltering daytime in this country bisected by the equator. Laundry hangs on wash lines crisscrossing the room. The walls are bare, except for etched phone numbers. There is no phone.
The contents of Phiona's home are: two water jugs, wash bin, small charcoal stove, teapot, a few plates and cups, toothbrush, tiny mirror, Bible and two musty mattresses. The latter suffice for the five people who regularly sleep in the shack: Phiona, mother Harriet, teenage brothers Brian and Richard, and her 6-year-old niece, Winnie. Pouches of curry powder, salt and tea leaves are the only hints of food.
PHIONA ENTERS THE competition venue, an indoor tennis arena packed with hundreds of chessboards, and quickly notices that she is among the youngest of more than 1,000 players from 149 countries. She is told that this is the most accomplished collection of chess talent ever assembled, which makes her nervous. She is the second-seeded player for the Ugandan team, but she isn't playing against kids anymore; her competitors are women. She keeps thinking to herself, Do I really belong here?
Her first opponent is Dina Kagramanov, the Canadian national champion. Kagramanov, born in Baku, Azerbaijan, the hometown of former men's world champion Garry Kasparov, learned the game at age 6. She is competing in her third Olympiad and, at 24, has been playing elite chess longer than Phiona has been alive.
Kagramanov preys on Phiona's inexperience, setting a trap early and gaining a pawn advantage that Phiona stubbornly tries and fails to reverse. After her win, Kagramanov is shocked to learn that this is Phiona's first international match against an adult. "She's a sponge," Kagramanov says. "She picks up on whatever information you give her, and she uses it against you. Anybody can be taught moves and how to react to those moves, but to reason like she does at her age is a gift that gives her the potential for greatness."
WHEN ASKED ABOUT early memories, Phiona can recall only loss. "I remember I went to my dad's village when I was about 3 years old to see him when he was very sick, and a week later he died of AIDS," she says. "After the funeral my family stayed in the village for a few weeks, and one morning when I woke up, my older sister, Juliet, told me she was feeling a headache. We got some herbs and gave them to her, and then she went to sleep. The following morning we found her dead in the bed. That's what I remember."
She tells also of being gravely ill when she was 8. Harriet begged her sister for money to take Phiona to the hospital, and though they were never given a diagnosis, Harriet believes her daughter had malaria. Phiona lost consciousness, doctors removed fluid from her spine, and Harriet was sure she'd have to bury another daughter. She later told Phiona, "You died for two days."
Stephanie SinclairPhiona's days are spent in search of food, working at the market with her mother and dreaming of an escape from Katwe's slums.Harriet, who is often sick, is sometimes gone from the shack for days trying to make money for her family's daily meal of rice and tea. She wakes at 2 a.m. to walk five kilometers and buy the avocados and eggplants that she resells at a street market. Phiona, who never knows when her mother will return, is left to care for her siblings.
Phiona does not know her birthday. Nobody bothers to record such things in Katwe. There are few calendars. Fewer clocks. Most people don't know the date or the day of the week. Every day is just like the last.
For her entire life Phiona's main challenge has been to find food. One afternoon in 2005, when she was just 9 but had already dropped out of school because her family couldn't afford it, she secretly followed Brian out of their shack in hopes he might lead to the first meal of the day. Brian had recently taken part in a project run by Sports Outreach Institute, a Christian mission that works to provide relief and religion through sports to the world's poorest people. Phiona watched Brian enter a dusty hallway, sit on a bench and begin playing with some black and white objects. Phiona had never seen anything like these pieces, and she thought they were beautiful. She peeked around a corner again and again, fascinated by the game and also wondering if there might be some food there. Suddenly, she was spotted. "Young girl," said Coach Robert. "Come in. Don't be afraid."
SHE IS LUCKY to be here. Uganda's women's team has never participated in an Olympiad before because it is expensive. But this year, according to members of the Ugandan Chess Federation, the president of FIDE, chess's governing body, is funding their trip. Phiona needs breaks like that.
On the second day of matches, she arrives early to explore. She sees Afghan women dressed in burkas, Indian women in saris and Bolivian women in ponchos and black bowler hats. She spots a blind player and wonders how that is possible. She sees an Iraqi kneel and begin to pray toward Mecca. As she approaches her table, Phiona is asked to produce her credential to prove she is actually a competitor, perhaps because she looks so young or perhaps because with her short hair, baggy sweater and sweatpants, she is mistaken for a boy.
Before her match begins against Elaine Lin Yu-Tong of Taiwan, Phiona slips off her sneakers. She isn't comfortable playing chess in shoes. Midway through the game, Phiona makes a tactical error, costing her two pawns. Her opponent makes a similar blunder later, but Phiona doesn't realize it until it's too late. From then on, she stares crestfallen at the board as the rest of the moves play out predictably, and she loses a match she thinks she should have won. Phiona leaves the table and bolts to the parking lot. Katende warned her never to go off on her own, but she boards a shuttle bus alone and returns to the hotel, then runs to her room and bawls into her pillow. Later that evening, Katende tries his best to comfort her, but Phiona is inconsolable. It is the only time chess has ever brought her to tears. In fact, she cannot remember the last time she cried.
ROBERT KATENDE WAS a bastard child who lived his early years with his grandmother in the village of Kiboga, outside Kampala. It wasn't until he was reunited with his mother in Kampala's Nakulabye slum, when he was 4, that he learned his first name. Until then he'd been known only as Katende.
Robert's mother died in 1990, when he was 8. He then began a decade-long odyssey from aunt to aunt and from school to school. He'd started playing soccer as a small boy in Kiboga, kicking a ball made of banana leaves. He grew into a center forward of such speed and skill that whenever his guardian of the moment could not afford to send him to school, a headmaster would hear of his soccer prowess and usher him in through a back door.
When Robert was 15, he suffered a severe head injury crashing into a goalkeeper. He lapsed into a coma, and everyone at school assumed he was dead. Robert emerged from the coma the next morning but spent three months in the hospital, where doctors told him he would never play soccer again. They were wrong.
Nine months after his injury, despite excruciating headaches, Robert returned to the soccer field. The game provided the only money he could earn. After a club soccer match in 2003, his coach told him about a job at Sports Outreach, and Robert, a born-again Christian, found his calling. He started playing for the ministry's team and was also assigned to Katwe, where he began drawing kids from the slum with the promise of soccer and postgame porridge. After several months, he noticed some children just watching from the sidelines, and he searched for a way to engage them. He found a solution in a nearly forgotten relic, a chess set given to him by a friend back in secondary school. "I had my doubts about chess in Katwe," Katende admits. "With their education and their environment, I wondered, Can these kids really play this game?"
Katende started offering chess after soccer games, beginning with a group of six boys who came to be known as The Pioneers. Two years later, the program had 25 children. That's when a barefoot 9-year-old girl in a torn and muddied skirt peeked into the entryway, and Coach Robert beckoned her inside.
CHESS. CHESS. CHESS. After a long day at the Olympiad, the players return to the hotel to talk about, what else, chess. If they are not talking chess, they are playing it.
Dina Kagramanov approaches Phiona in the hotel lobby and hands her two books on advanced chess. Then, with Katende interpreting, the two players break down their first-round match, Kagramanov explaining the strategy behind her own moves and asking about the decisions Phiona made instinctively.
Like each day she will spend in Siberia, Phiona is engulfed by chess, pausing only to visit the hotel restaurant where she dines three times a day at an all-you-can-eat buffet. At the first few meals Phiona makes herself sick by overeating. Even during dinner, chess moves are replayed with salt and pepper shakers.
"WHEN I FIRST saw chess, I thought, What could make all these kids so silent?" Phiona recalls. "Then I watched them play the game and get happy and excited, and I wanted a chance to be that happy."
Katende showed Phiona the pieces and explained how each was restricted by rules about how it could move. The pawns. The rooks. The bishops. The knights. The king. And finally the queen, the most powerful piece on the board. How could Phiona have imagined at the time where those 32 pieces and 64 squares would deliver her?
Phiona started walking six kilometers every day to play chess. During her early development, she played too recklessly. She often sacrificed crucial pieces in risky attempts to defeat her opponents as quickly as possible, even when playing black -- which means going second and taking a defensive posture to open the match. Says Phiona, "I must have lost my first 50 matches before Coach Robert persuaded me to act more like a girl and play with calm and patience."
The first match Phiona ever won was against Joseph Asaba, a young boy who had beaten her before by utilizing a tactic called the Fool's Mate, a humiliating scheme that can produce victory in as few as four moves. One day Joseph wasn't aware that Katende had prepared Phiona with a defense against the Fool's Mate that would capture Joseph's queen. When Phiona finally checkmated Joseph, she didn't even know it until Joseph began sobbing because he had lost to a girl. While other girls in the project were afraid to play against boys, Phiona relished it. Katende eventually introduced Phiona to Ivan Mutesasira and Benjamin Mukumbya, two of the project's strongest players, who agreed to tutor her. "When I first met Phiona, I took it for granted that girls are always weak, that girls can do nothing, but I came to realize that she could play as well as a boy," Ivan says. "She plays very aggressively, like a boy. She likes to attack, and when you play against her, it feels like she's always pushing you backward until you have nowhere to move."
News eventually spread around Katwe that Katende was part of an organization run by white people, known in Uganda as mzungu, and Harriet began hearing disturbing rumors. "My neighbors told me that chess was a white man's game and that if I let Phiona keep going there to play, that mzungu would take her away," she says. "But I could not afford to feed her. What choice did I have?"
Stephanie Sinclair"When I first saw chess, I thought, What could make all these kids so silent?" Phiona recalls. "Then I watched them play the game and get happy and excited, and I wanted a chance to be that happy."Within a year, Phiona could beat her coach, and Katende knew it was time for her and the others to face better competition outside the project. He visited local boarding schools, where children from more privileged backgrounds refused to play the slum kids because they smelled bad and seemed like they might steal from them. But Katende kept asking until 10-year-old Phiona was playing against teens in fancy blazers and knickers, beating them soundly. Then she played university players, defeating them, as well.
She has learned the game strictly through trial and error, trained by a coach who has played chess recreationally off and on for years, admitting he didn't even know all of the rules until he was given Chess for Beginners shortly after starting the project. Phiona plays on instinct instead of relying on opening and end-game theory like more refined players. She succeeds because she possesses that precious chess gene that allows her to envision the board many moves ahead, and because she focuses on the game as if her life depended on it, which in her case might be true.
Phiona first won the Uganda women's junior championship in 2007, when she was 11. She won that title three years in a row, and it would have been four, but the Uganda Chess Federation didn't have the funds to stage it in 2010. She is still so early in her learning curve that chess experts believe her potential is staggering. "To love the game as much as she does and already be a champion at her age means her future is much bigger than any girl I've ever known," says George Zirembuzi, Uganda's national team coach, who has trained with grandmasters in Russia. "When Phiona loses, she really feels hurt, and I like that, because that characteristic will help her keep thirsting to get better."
Although Phiona is already implausibly good at something she has no business even doing, she is, like most girls and women in Uganda, uncomfortable sharing what she's thinking. Normally, nobody cares. She tries to answer any questions about herself with a shrug. When Phiona is compelled to speak, she is barely audible and usually staring at her feet. She realizes that chess makes her stand out, which makes her a target in Katwe, among the most dangerous neighborhoods in Uganda. So she is conditioned to say as little as possible. "Her personality with the outside world is still quite reserved, because she feels inferior due to her background," Katende says. "But in chess I am always reminding her that anyone can lift a piece, because it is so light. What separates you is where you choose to put it down. Chess is the one thing in Phiona's life she can control. Chess is her one chance to feel superior."
CHESS IS NOT a spectator sport. During matches at the Olympiad, it is not uncommon for 20 minutes to elapse without a single move. Players often leave the table for a bathroom break or to get a cup of tea or to psyche out an opponent by pretending that it isn't even necessary to sit at the board to conquer it. Phiona never leaves the table. She doesn't know what it means to psyche out an opponent or, fortunately for her, what it means to be psyched out.
But she is restless. These games progress too slowly for her, nothing like chess back in Uganda. She has spent two matches fidgeting and slouching in her seat, desperate for her opponents to get on with it.
Wary after Phiona's breakdown following the second match, Katende is ruing the Uganda Chess Federation's decision to place Phiona as her team's No. 2 seed, where she must face the top players from other teams rather than lower-seeded players with less experience, whom he suspects she could be defeating.
Phiona's third match is against a women's grandmaster from Egypt, Khaled Mona. Pleased by Mona's quick pace of play, Phiona gets lured into her opponent's rhythm and plays too fast, leading to fatal errors. Mona plays flawlessly and needs just 24 moves to win. When Phiona concedes after less than an hour, Katende looks worried, but Phiona recognizes that on this day she's been beaten by a better player. Instead of being discouraged, she is inspired. Phiona walks straight over to Katende and says, "Coach, I will be a grandmaster someday."
She looks relieved, and a bit astonished, to have spoken those words.
CHESS HAD TRANSPORTED Phiona out of Katwe once before. In August 2009 she traveled with Benjamin and Ivan to Juba, Sudan, where the three represented Uganda in Africa's International Children's Chess Tournament. Several other players who had qualified to join them on the national team refused to go with the slum kids.
It was Phiona's first trip out of Uganda, her first visit to an airport. "It felt like taking someone from the 19th century and plunging them into the present world," says Godfrey Gali, the Uganda Chess Federation's general secretary. "Everything at the airport was so strange to her; security cameras, luggage conveyors, so many white people. Then when the plane flew above the clouds, Phiona asked me, 'Mr. Gali, are we about to reach heaven?' She was totally sincere."
At their hotel in Sudan, Phiona had her own bed for the first time in her life. She had never before used a toilet that flushed. At the hotel restaurant she was handed a huge menu, a strange notion for someone who had never had a choice of what to eat at a meal before. "I could never have imagined this world I was visiting," Phiona says. "I felt like a queen."
In the tournament, the Ugandan trio, by far the youngest team in the competition, played against teams from 16 other African nations. In her opening match, Phiona faced a Kenyan who had a reputation as the best young female player in Africa. Despite her hands trembling with each early move, Phiona built a position advantage, isolated the enemy king, then checkmated her surprised opponent. Phiona won all four matches she played. Benjamin and Ivan were undefeated as well, and the three kids from Katwe won the team championship and a trophy too big to fit into any of their tiny backpacks.
A stunned Russian chess administrator, Igor Bolotinsky, approached Phiona after the tournament and told her, "I have a son who is an international chess master, and he was not as good at your age as you are."
When the Ugandan delegation returned to Kampala, Katende met them at the airport. He tried to congratulate Phiona, but she was too busy laughing and teasing her teammates, something he had never seen her do before. For once, he realized, Phiona was just being the kid that she is.
But as Phiona, Benjamin and Ivan were driven back into Katwe for a victory celebration, a psychological shift took place. Windows in their van were reflexively shut and backpacks pushed out of sight. Smiling faces turned solemn, the mask of the slum. The three children discussed who would keep the trophy, and it was decided that none of them could because it would surely be stolen. They were greeted with cheers and chants of "Uganda-Uganda-Uganda!"
But they were also met with some strange questions: Did you fly on the silver bird? Did you stay indoors or in the bush? Why did you come back here? "It struck me how difficult it must have been for them to go to another world and return," says Rodney Suddith, the director of Sports Outreach. "Sudan might as well be the moon to people in the slum. The three kids couldn't share their experience with the others because they just couldn't connect. It puzzled me at first, and then it made me sad, and then I wondered, Is what they have done really a good thing?"
As Phiona left the celebration headed for her home that night, someone excitedly asked her, "What is the first thing you're going to say to your mother?"
"I need to ask her," Phiona said, " 'Do we have enough food for breakfast?' "
WHO IS SHE? Is Phiona trying to prove that she's no better than anyone else or that she's better than everyone else? Imagine that psychological tug-of-war inside the mind of the least secure creature on earth, a teenage girl, as she sits at a chessboard nearly 5,000 miles from home.
Phiona's opponent in her fourth match, an Angolan, Sonia Rosalina, keeps staring at Phiona's eyes, which Rosalina will later say are the most competitive she has faced in chess. Phiona is behind for most of the match, but refuses to surrender. She battles back and has a chance to force a draw in the end game, but at the critical moment, she plays too passively, too defensively, not like herself. After more than three hours and 144 moves, Phiona grudgingly submits, admitting that she didn't have her "courage" when she needed it most. She promises herself that she will never let that happen again.
NO MATTER HOW far chess has taken Phiona Mutesi, a 10-foot-by-10-foot home in Katwe remains her destination, the life of the ultimate underdog is still her routine. Although Phiona is back in school through a grant from Sports Outreach, she is just learning to read and write. Also, Phiona faces a potential hazard that could make her life even more challenging: Her father died of AIDS, and her mother worries her constant illnesses are because she is HIV-positive, but she is too afraid to be tested. Phiona has never been tested either.
Phiona says that her dream for the future is to build a house outside Katwe for her mother so that she would never have to move again. When Harriet is asked if her daughter can escape the slum, she says, "I have never thought about that." Ugandan universities are not handing out scholarships for chess, and, without benefactors stepping in again, a trip to the 2012 Olympiad in Istanbul, Turkey, is unlikely.
Katende, when pressed to describe Phiona's realistic blueprint out of Katwe, can come up only with a vision he's had about starting an academy where the children of the chess project earn money teaching the game to kids of wealthy families. He says he hopes through her chess that Phiona can begin to blaze a trail out of the slum for all of his chess kids to follow. To do that, though, Phiona must produce on a world stage like no other Ugandan, man or woman, has ever achieved.
SEPT. 30, 2010, in Khanty-Mansiysk is cold and dreary, like every other day at the Olympiad. Phiona hates Russian weather but loves the hotel room, the clean water, the three meals a day. She is dreading her return home in four days, when she must begin scrapping for food again.
She sits at the chessboard for her fifth match wearing a white knit hat, a black overcoat and woolly beige boots that are several sizes too large, all gifts from various mzungu. Her opponent is an Ethiopian, Haregeweyn Abera, who, like Phiona, is an African teenager. For the first time in the tournament, Phiona sees someone across the table she can relate to. She sees herself. For the first time in the tournament, she is not intimidated at all.
Phiona plays black but remains patient and gradually shifts the momentum during the first 20 moves of the match until she creates an opening to attack. Suddenly she feels like she is back at Agape church, pushing and pushing and pushing Abera's pieces into retreat until there is nowhere left for Abera to move.
Abera extends her hand in defeat. Phiona tries and fails to suppress her gap-toothed grin, then rises and skips out of the hall into the frigid Siberian air. This dismissed girl from a dismissed world cocks her head back and unleashes a blissful shriek into the slate gray sky, loud enough to startle players still inside the arena.
RAPE, A WEAPON OF WAR
Destroying the glue of a society
(GO HERE FOR MULTI-MEDIA REPORT)
Jan 11th 2011, 17:44 by The Economist online
Marcus Bleasdale talks about a selection of his photographs chronicling the impact of rape in war-torn areas of Africa
__________________________War's overlooked victimsRape is horrifyingly widespread in conflicts all around the world
Violence against women
Jan 13th 2011 | GOMA | from PRINT EDITION
SHORTLY after the birth of her sixth child, Mathilde went with her baby into the fields to collect the harvest. She saw two men approaching, wearing what she says was the uniform of the FDLR, a Rwandan militia. Fleeing them she ran into another man, who beat her head with a metal bar. She fell to the ground with her baby and lay still. Perhaps thinking he had murdered her, the man went away. The other two came and raped her, then they left her for dead.
Mathilde’s story is all too common. Rape in war is as old as war itself. After the sack of Rome 16 centuries ago Saint Augustine called rape in wartime an “ancient and customary evil”. For soldiers, it has long been considered one of the spoils of war. Antony Beevor, a historian who has written about rape during the Soviet conquest of Germany in 1945, says that rape has occurred in war since ancient times, often perpetrated by indisciplined soldiers. But he argues that there are also examples in history of rape being used strategically, to humiliate and to terrorise, such as the Moroccan regulares in Spain’s civil war.
As the reporting of rape has improved, the scale of the crime has become more horrifyingly apparent (see table). And with the Bosnian war of the 1990s came the widespread recognition that rape has been used systematically as a weapon of war and that it must be punished as an egregious crime. In 2008 the UN Security Council officially acknowledged that rape has been used as a tool of war. With these kinds of resolutions and global campaigns against rape in war, the world has become more sensitive. At least in theory, the Geneva Conventions, governing the treatment of civilians in war, are respected by politicians and generals in most decent states. Generals from rich countries know that their treatment of civilians in the theatre of war comes under ever closer scrutiny. The laws and customs of war are clear. But in many parts of the world, in the Hobbesian anarchy of irregular war, with ill-disciplined private armies or militias, these norms carry little weight.
Take Congo; it highlights both how horribly common rape is, and how hard it is to document and measure, let alone stop. The eastern part of the country has been a seething mess since the Rwandan genocide of 1994. In 2008 the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a humanitarian group, estimated that 5.4m people had died in “Africa’s world war”. Despite peace deals in 2003 and 2008, the tempest of violence has yet fully to subside. As Congo’s army and myriad militias do battle, the civilians suffer most. Rape has become an ugly and defining feature of the conflict.
Plenty of figures on how many women have been raped are available but none is conclusive. In October Roger Meece, the head of the United Nations in Congo, told the UN Security Council that 15,000 women had been raped throughout the country in 2009 (men suffer too, but most victims are female). The UN Population Fund estimated 17,500 victims for the same period. The IRC says it treated 40,000 survivors in the eastern province of South Kivu alone between 2003 and 2008.
“The data only tell you so much,” says Hillary Margolis, who runs the IRC’s sexual-violence programme in North Kivu. These numbers are the bare minimum; the true figures may be much higher. Sofia Candeias, who co-ordinates the UN Development Programme’s Access to Justice project in Congo, points out that more rapes are reported in places with health services. In the areas where fighting is fiercest, women may have to walk hundreds of miles to find anyone to tell that they have been attacked. Even if they can do so, it may be months or years after the assault. Many victims are killed by their assailants. Others die of injuries. Many do not report rape because of the stigma.
Congo’s horrors are mind-boggling. A recent study by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Oxfam examined rape survivors at the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, a town in North Kivu province. Their ages ranged from three to 80. Some were single, some married, some widows. They came from all ethnicities. They were raped in homes, fields and forests. They were raped in front of husbands and children. Almost 60% were gang-raped. Sons were forced to rape mothers, and killed if they refused.
The attention paid to Congo reflects growing concern about rape in war. Historically the taboo surrounding rape has been so strong that few cases were reported; evidence of wartime rape before the 20th century is scarce. With better reporting, the world has woken up to the scale of the crime. The range of sexual violence in war has become apparent: the abduction of women as sex slaves, sexualised torture and mutilation, rape in public or private.
In some wars all parties engage in it. In others it is inflicted mainly by one side. Rape in wars in Africa has had a lot of attention in recent years, but it is not just an African problem. Conflicts with high levels of rape between 1980 and 2009 were most numerous in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Dara Kay Cohen of the University of Minnesota (see chart). But only a third of sub-Saharan Africa’s 28 civil wars saw the worst levels of rape—compared with half of Eastern Europe’s nine. And no part of the world has escaped the scourge.
The anarchy and impunity of war goes some way to explaining the violence. The conditions of war are often conducive to rape. Young, ill-trained men, fighting far from home, are freed from social and religious constraints. The costs of rape are lower, the potential rewards higher. And for ill-fed, underpaid combatants, rape can be a kind of payment.
Widespread, but not inevitable
Then consider the type of wars fought today. Many recent conflicts have involved not organised armies but scrappy militias fighting amid civilians. As wars have moved from battlefields to villages, women and girls have become more vulnerable. For many, the home front no longer exists; every house is now on the front line.
But rape in war is not inevitable. In El Salvador’s civil war, it was rare. When it did occur it was almost always carried out by state forces. The left-wing militias fighting against the government for years relied on civilians for information. You can rape to terrorise people or force them to leave an area, says Elisabeth Wood, a professor at Yale University and the Santa Fe Institute, but rape is not effective when you want long-term, reliable intelligence from them or to rule them in the future.
Some groups commit all kinds of other atrocities, but abhor rape. The absence of sexual violence in the Tamil Tigers’ forced displacement of tens of thousands of Muslims from the Jaffna peninsula in 1990 is a case in point. Rape is often part of ethnic cleansing but it was strikingly absent here. Tamil mores prohibit sex between people who are not married and sex across castes (though they are less bothered about marital rape). What is more, Ms Wood explains, the organisation’s strict internal discipline meant commanders could enforce these judgments.
Some leaders, such as Jean-Pierre Bemba, a Congolese militia boss who is now on trial for war-crimes in The Hague, say they lack full control over their troops. But a commander with enough control to direct soldiers in military operations can probably stop them raping, says Ms Wood. A decision to turn a blind eye may have less to do with lack of control, and more with a chilling assessment of rape’s use as a terror tactic.
Rape is a means of subduing foes and civilians without having to engage in the risky business of battle. Faced with rape, civilians flee, leaving their land and property to their attackers. In August rebel militias raped around 240 people over four days in the Walikale district of eastern Congo. The motives for the attack are unclear. The violence may have been to intimidate the population into providing the militia with gold and tin from nearby mines. Or maybe one bit of the army was colluding with the rebels to avoid being replaced by another bit and losing control of the area and its resources. In Walikale, at least, rape seems to have been a deliberate tactic, not a random one, says Ms Margolis.
At worst, rape is a tool of ethnic cleansing and genocide, as in Bosnia, Darfur and Rwanda. Rape was first properly recognised as a weapon of war after the conflict in Bosnia. Though all sides were guilty, most victims were Bosnian Muslims assaulted by Serbs. Muslim women were herded into “rape camps” where they were raped repeatedly, usually by groups of men. The full horrors of these camps emerged in hearings at the war-crimes tribunal on ex-Yugoslavia in The Hague; victims gave evidence in writing or anonymously. After the war some perpetrators said that they had been ordered to rape—either to ensure that non-Serbs would flee certain areas, or to impregnate women so that they bore Serb children. In 1995, when Croatian forces over-ran Serb-held areas, there were well-attested cases of sexual violence against both women and men.
In the Sudanese region of Darfur, rape and other forms of sexual violence have also been a brutally effective way to terrorise and control civilians. Women are raped in and around the refugee camps that litter the region, mostly when they leave the camps to collect firewood, water and food. Those of the same ethnicity as the two main rebel groups have been targeted most as part of the campaign of ethnic cleansing. According to Human Rights Watch, rape is chronically underreported, partially because in the mostly Muslim region sexual violence is a sensitive subject. Between October 2004 and February 2005 Médecins Sans Frontières, a French charity, treated almost 500 women and girls in South Darfur. The actual number of victims is likely to be much higher.
In the Rwandan genocide rape was “the rule and its absence the exception”, in the words of the UN. In the weeks before the killings began, Hutu-controlled newspapers ran cartoons showing Tutsi women having sex with Belgian peacekeepers, who were seen as allies of Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front. Inger Skjelsbæk, deputy director of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, argues that Hutu propaganda may not have openly called for rape, but it certainly suggested that the Hutu cause would be well served by the sexual violation of Tutsi women. Jens Meierhenrich, a Rwanda-watcher at the London School of Economics, says that even if high-level commanders did not tell men to rape, they gave tacit approval. Lower-ranking officers may have openly encouraged the crime.
Out of Rwanda’s horror came the first legal verdict that acknowledged rape as part of a genocidal campaign. After the conviction of Jean Paul Akayesu, a local politician, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda said systematic sexual violence, perpetrated against Tutsi women and them alone, had been an integral part of the effort to wipe out the Tutsis.
For combatants who know little about each other, complicity in rape can serve as a bond. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone, most of whose members say they were kidnapped into its ranks and then raped thousands during the civil war, is a case in point. Ms Cohen argues that armed groups that are not socially cohesive, particularly those whose fighters have been forcibly recruited, are more likely to commit rape, especially gang rape, so as to build internal ties.
For the victims and their families, rape does the opposite. The shame and degradation of rape rip apart social bonds. In societies where a family’s honour rests on the sexual purity of its women, the blame for the loss of that honour often falls not upon the rapist, but the raped. In Bangladesh, where most of the victims were Muslim, the use of rape was not only humiliating for them as individuals but for their families and communities. The then prime minister, Mujibur Rahman, tried to counter this by calling them heroines who needed protection and reintegration. Some men agreed but most did not; they demanded sweeteners in the form of extra dowry payments from the authorities.
In Congo, despite the efforts of activists, rape still brings shame to the victim, says Ms Margolis: “People can sit around and talk about the importance of removing the stigma in the abstract, but when it comes to their own wives or daughters or sisters, it is a different story.” Many are rejected by their family and stigmatised by their community after being raped.
There is little prospect of justice for the victims of rape. Mr Akayesu is one of the few people brought to book for rape in war. Though wartime rape is prohibited under the Geneva rules, sexual violence has often been prosecuted less fiercely than other war crimes. But the Balkan war-crimes court broke new ground by issuing verdicts treating rape as a crime against humanity. The convictions of three men for the rape, torture and sexual enslavement of women in the Bosnian town of Foca was a big landmark.
But in Congo the court system is in pieces. There have been fewer than 20 prosecutions of rape as either a war crime or a crime against humanity. The American Bar Association, which helps victims bring their cases to court in eastern Congo, has processed around 145 cases in the past two years. This has resulted in about 45 trials and 36 convictions based on domestic legislation, including a law introduced in 2006 to try and address the problem of sexual violence. Those who work with the survivors of rape in Congo have mixed feelings about the 2006 law. It has pricked consciences and made people more aware of their rights, concedes Ms Margolis. It creates a theoretical accountability that could help punish perpetrators. But for women seeking justice, it has yet to have much impact. “There is still a glimmer of hope in people’s eyes when they talk about the law. But the judicial and security systems need to be improved so that it can be applied better, or people may lose confidence in it,” Ms Margolis says.
Huge practical problems beset the legal system in Congo, says Richard Malengule, head of the Gender and Justice programme at HEAL Africa, a hospital in Goma. People have to walk 300km to get to a court. There is no money and no training for the police. Even if people are arrested, they are often released within a few days, in many cases by making a deal with the victim’s family or the court. Those that go to jail often escape within days. Many prisons have no door—or corrupt guards.
Given the parlous state of Congo’s judiciary, raising the number of prosecutions may not help. Some want more international involvement. Justine Masika, who runs an organisation in Goma seeking justice for the victims of sex crimes, says Congolese courts must work with international ones in prosecuting rape. But “hybrid” courts require some commitment from the local government; Congo’s rulers do not show much commitment to tackling rape. The International Criminal Court is investigating crimes, including rape, in Congo but gathering necessary evidence is hard.
Raising global awareness is another avenue; it helps lessen the stigma. Various UN resolutions over the past ten years have highlighted and condemned sexual violence against women and girls and called on countries to do more to combat it. But worthy language will not be enough.
Worse, the UN has faced criticism for failing to protect Congolese civilians from rape. In the Walikale attack, one UN official worries that the body is not meeting its obligations to protect civilians. He accepts that in remote places it is hard for peacekeepers to reach civilians, but insists that this does not justify the UN’s failure in Walikale. He is dubious, too, about the investigations into the incident. “All these interviews, these investigations, what have they achieved? The survivors are interviewed again and again and again? Where does that get them?”
Without the presence of the UN, atrocities would be even more widespread, says Mr Malengule. But in the long term, he says, more pressure must be put on Congo’s government to tackle rape. At present, one aid worker laments, it just gets a lot of lip-service. The government would rather Congo were not known as the world’s rape capital, but it shows little interest in real change.
Even when wars end, rape continues. Humanitarian agencies in Congo report high levels of rape in areas that are quite peaceful now. Again, it is hard to assess numbers. Figures for rape before the war do not exist. A greater willingness to report rape may account for the apparent increase. But years of fighting have resulted in a culture of rape and violence, says Mr Malengule. Efforts to reintegrate ex-combatants into society have been short and unsuccessful, with little follow-up to assess results. Add to that the dismal judicial system, and the outlook is grim.
It is bleaker still when you see how long rape’s effects endure. Rebels seized Angelique’s village in 1994. They slit her husband’s throat. Then they bound her between two trees, arms and legs tied apart. Seven men raped her before she fainted. She does not know how many raped her after that. Then they shoved sticks in her vagina. Tissue between her vagina and rectum was ripped, and she developed a fistula. For 16 years she leaked urine and faeces. Now she is getting medical treatment, but justice is a distant dream.
Correction: The original table in this piece was misworded. The third line should have referred to the Pakistani army, rather than the Indian army. Apologies. This was corrected on January 14th 2011.
Slideshow: Marcus Bleasdale talks about a selection of his photographs chronicling the impact of rape in war-torn areas of Africa
One Day in Port-au-Prince -
THE SEX WORKER:
'God didn't give me a body
to sell'
By Tim Large | Wed., January 5, 4:35 PM | Comments ( 2 )
GO HERE TO VIEW MULTIMEDIA DOCUMENTARY
Photo by Tim Large
Evelyne Pierre features in One Day in Port-au-Prince, a multimedia documentary.
PORT-AU-PRINCE (AlertNet) - We “picked up” Evelyne outside a bar in downtown Port-au-Prince, where she was milling around with five or six other girls, propositioning passers-by.
Peter, our Haitian cameraman, explained to her about our documentary, then walked her to the hotel around the corner for the interview. He didn’t want her to be seen driving off with foreigners. Her pimps might expect her to come back with a lot of cash.
Evelyne Pierre, 23, was adamant that she wanted to appear on camera. No hiding her identity. She wanted the world to know that young women like her only sell their bodies because they have to. After the quake, it’s the only way to survive.
“There is no one to help us, to talk about the crisis,” she said. “Since January 12, we are malnourished. We don’t eat well and we don’t sleep well.”
She took out a coin and started rubbing it between two fingers, like a lucky talisman.
“I’ve lost my mother,” she said. “The house collapsed on her. I threw my hands in the air. I screamed. Nobody answered. I have a baby with me, and I was forced to live in the street.”
Outside, torrential rain was slamming against the windows.
“Right now, while it’s raining, nobody can sleep under the tents, because when it rains a lot the water gets into the tents and you can’t sleep,” she said.
“Only after the rain stops can we go back to the tents. You have to spread a sheet on the floor with your child. The cold weather is not good, and then you’re forced to go to somebody’s house. You ask someone for a place to sleep with your child until the morning.”
Evelyne’s son is 1. The boy’s father was killed in the earthquake. Tonight, her son was being looked after by a friend in one of the sprawling camps in downtown Port-au-Prince, where more than 1.2 million people still live under canvas.
“I’m the mother, I’m the father,” she said. “I provide for myself. Nobody provides for me… I can’t find work in this country. You finish school but you can’t find work. You have a trade but you can’t find work.”
Before the disaster, Evelyne was a beautician in the southeastern town of Fond des Blancs with a diploma in cosmetics and hairdressing.
Today, she touts for business along the Rue du Centre, conspicuous in shorts and a sparkling pink top. She has tattoos on her wrists and thighs, including a couple of love hearts pierced with arrows.
“I shouldn’t be here, because God didn’t give me a body to sell it through prostitution,” she said. “I don’t have a choice. There is no prayer, no Amen. I may be suffering today, but if God wants, he can free me tomorrow. We never know in life.
“If I could find work, I would never be in this dirty prostitution game. We’re going through a lot of humiliation. People drive by in a car and we’re standing, it’s raining, and they just pass in the street and splash us with dirty water. They don’t even treat us like dogs.”
Prostitution is not illegal in Haiti, but that doesn’t mean sex workers aren’t harassed by the police.
“The police are frightening us, arresting us,” she said. “If they see that you have a child, they let you go. If you don’t have a child, they keep you and let you go the next morning, God willing.”
Listening to her story, you’d expect Evelyn to feel bitterness towards the men she says humiliate her by shouting: “Look at that whore calling to me!” In fact, she’s remarkably fatalistic.
“In spite of the humiliation, we are not discouraged,” she said. “We leave it all to Jesus. Today they might be better off, and tomorrow, God willing, we might be better off. It’s no problem.”
By the time the interview was over, it had stopped raining. Evelyne walked back into the thick air of the Haitian night to return to the pimps and sex workers by the cafe.
“My friends may have thought I’d been abducted,” she said, and was gone.
Want to send Evelyne a message? We’d be happy to translate and deliver it. Please leave a comment below.
__________________________
08 Dec 2010
Haitians carry water for cooking in a camp for internally displaced in Port-au-Prince, November 26, 2010. REUTERS/ Eduardo Munoz
LONDON (AlertNet) - People receiving aid in Haiti, Kenya and Thailand say they feel at risk of sexual exploitation by humanitarian workers who are meant to help them, according to a report published this week.
The study, commissioned by the Geneva-based Human Accountability Partnership (HAP), said reported sexual incidents involved paid international and national aid workers as well as volunteers.
Researchers for HAP, the humanitarian sector's first international self-regulatory body, spoke to 732 recipients of aid - 411 female and 321 male - in the three countries between July and October this year.
The report gave the example of Haiti, whose capital Port-au-Prince is awash with aid workers helping more than 1.3 million homeless survivors of the January earthquake.
“The person in charge of making the list of people eligible for the cash-for-work schemes will put your name on the list in exchange for sex,” the researchers quoted a women’s group in Haiti as saying.
One of the aims of the study was to gauge the success of initiatives to combat sexual exploitation that were introduced after a 2002 report highlighted the abuse of vulnerable people by aid workers in West Africa.
The new study said the most common complaint from the people surveyed was that humanitarian organisations had not discussed the risk of sexual exploitation and abuse with them, and that little had been agreed to prevent it from taking place.
"Under-reporting is still a major issue. Most beneficiaries say they would report SEA (sexual exploitation and abuse) by humanitarian workers, but the actual number of reported cases does not appear to bear this out," the authors noted.
Another problem, they said, was the fact that people in Kenya for example did not perceive the complaints boxes to be confidential so they weren't using them.
"Reporting also depends on whether or not beneficiaries see the incident as exploitative - consensual sex between humanitarian workers and beneficiaries may not necessarily be considered exploitative - and whether beneficiaries feel they have enough evidence to make a report," the study added.
The report also focused on extensive sexual violations by other people, such as camp residents, describing abuse by aid staff as “just the tip of the iceberg when seen in the broader context”.
In a number of camps in Haiti, it said, some residents volunteered to give away food in exchange for sex and women offered sex for something to eat.
“The risk of SEA by humanitarian aid workers is still significant, but is part of a bigger picture of abuse and exploitation taking place more generally,” the report said.
HAP was set up in 2003, partly in response to the longstanding debate about whether humanitarian resources were being efficiently and effectively managed.
Haiti Earthquake Anniversary:
Finding a Skull in the Rubble
Damas Negrial started the day Wednesday clearing rubble. He is trying to rebuild his house in Fort National, a hilltop neighborhood in Port au Prince that was almost completely destroyed by the earthquake last January, and was salvaging bricks from the neighboring plot. As he dug, he felt something far smoother than the jagged, broken bricks and twisted metal beneath his fingers. It was the skull of his neighbor, 11-year-old Stephanie, who, with her three siblings had been entombed when their home fell exactly a year before.
Wednesday, at Fort National, Negrial gathered with dozens of neighbors for a moment of silence at 4:53 p.m., the exact time that the earthquake began. Hundreds of silver balloons floated in the air, so high that they looked like stars in the afternoon sky. But the moment of silence never happened; a drunkard started arguing with people and caused a small scuffle.
Damas Negrial gestures toward the skull discovered in the rubble near his Port-au-Prince home. (Credit: Andre Lambertson)
Negrial walked the precipitous path, down a steep hill littered with rubble and glass, to his house. He uncovered the girl's skull, which he had wrapped in an old T-shirt and tucked it into the rubble.
Stephanie's mother has moved away, and so Negrial says he will either burn the bones, as he does not have money to properly bury them, or give them to the people he says sometimes come around to collect bones for research.
"It did not really affect me too much, finding these bones…We suffered through the smell of these bodies for months, and we have suffered through so much else, so we are used to it."
"It did not really affect me too much, finding these bones," says Negrial. "We have to be resilient. We suffered through the smell of these bodies for months, and we have suffered through so much else, so we are used to it."
Negrial, 36, also spent last January 12 digging through rubble. His sister Marie Michele and her three children had been living on the second floor of a three-story building, and were trapped when it collapsed. Negrial was sure that they had been killed.
"When my mother came, I told her, 'We have lost everyone,'" says Negrial, "but someone said that since we are a family who always pray, we are servants of God, my sister and her family must have survived."
Marie Michele, 26, was making spaghetti for dinner the afternoon of the earthquake. Her children, Starline, 6, Lysondya, 11, and Michela, 18 months, were watching television. When Marie Michele walked over to change the channel, she felt the ground shake.
"My children did not understand what was happening, and I was just calling, 'Jesus, Jesus,'" says Marie Michele. "Then I saw the wall falling in front and another falling behind. They fell together, like two mountains meeting."
Marie Michele passed out. When she woke up, she felt that her lips were cut and bleeding. She had fallen on top of Michela, who was trapped in a small space, wriggling, trying to free herself from under her mother. Lysondya was next to Marie Michele, with her arm around her mother's neck. Neither could move because a wall had collapsed on top of them.
Marie Michele called for help, however, Lysondya asked her to stop, because each time her mother cried out, the rubble shifted slightly, and the shards of brick were cutting into her arm.
"Then, I asked Lysondya if she had seen or heard Starline, because the whole time, we had not heard anything from her. I said, if we don't hear anything from her soon, then we know she is dead," says Marie Michele.
At that moment, Starline cried out: "Mummy! Come help me. I need to go to the bathroom, and I'm thirsty!"
About an hour passed, and Marie Michele heard her brother and mother outside, crying, however, when she called out to them, her voice was lost in the rubble so that they could not hear her. For the next three hours, Marie Michele and her daughters lay beneath the debris. Negrial and the other neighbors had run up to the main road, because they were afraid that the aftershocks would send more buildings tumbling down.
Marie Michele with her daughter Michela. (Credit: Andre Lambertson)
Marie Michele could not cry—"My eyes had no water," she says—and eventually, she and the girls were so exhausted, they could not even speak. It was the one thing that had sustained them, because at least as they spoke, they could each tell that the others were alive.
Marie Michele was certain that they were going to die. A live wire had connected with the metal bars of the house, and the electric shock was burning Lysondya's leg. Lysondya made a pact with her mother: "If I die first, you pray for me, and if you die first, I'll pray for you," she said.
And then Marie Michele, who is deeply religious, says she heard a voice. "It was a real voice, not the voice of the neighbors or my family, but a voice from somewhere else telling me that we would live."
"I said, 'Lysondya, let us gather our strength and make one last call. If they don't come, then we are going to die,'" says Marie Michele.
When the two cried out, a pastor who lived on the floor above them and had come looking for survivors heard. He, Negrial, and neighbors dug for two hours, in the pitch dark, to free Marie Michele and the girls.
"When I came out, at first I felt good, I said thanks to God. But then I realized that my body had collapsed everywhere. It was 11, and the blood all over my body was making me cold. I couldn't feel my legs," says Marie Michele.
The next day, Marie Michele's boyfriend drove Lysondya and Starline to Santo Domingo for medical treatment. Lysondya's right cheek had been completely sliced through by a sharp piece of brick, and Starline's legs had been badly damaged.
Marie Michele stayed behind with the baby, who, except for some swelling, was fine. But when the cuts all over Marie Michele's body did not heal, Negrial decided to take her to Santo Domingo as well, a week later.
Marie Michele does not have a passport, and so they knew that she would likely be turned back at the Haiti-Dominican Republic border. However, Negrial was determined to get his sister to the hospital.
"I said, even if they kill me, I will make it through," he says.
As it turns out, the border guards were preoccupied with the many journalists trying to get through from the Dominican Republic to Haiti, and so they did not even stop Negrial and his sister.
But on this anniversary, Negrial and his family were focused less on the suffering and death that came when the world around them collapsed a year ago, and more on the things they do have.
"Today, I feel great," says Marie Michele. "I went to the church to say thanks to God, because I am alive."
Lisa Armstrong is reporting from Haiti for The Pulitzer Center
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Jan 15, 2011 – 7:30 AM
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