TERRE HAUTE — In the time it will take to watch tonight’s episode of American Idol, at least one female will have been raped in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in the South Kivu Province of the DRC alone, while many assaults go unreported.
A missionary couple from Terre Haute wanted to help those women and children. On Sunday, their hard work came to fruition when the doors of Tracy’s Heart Center opened.
Brenda Buell and her husband, Ed, of ACM International have been working since last June with various churches to get the center started.
Tracy’s Heart Center is a safehouse in the town of Bukavu, where rape victims can find medical help — physical and psychological.
With the center’s official opening, the group is now training people who will go into the villages to meet with the victims instead of making them go to the city, which can be difficult if they don’t have money or transportation, Buell said.
Victims who have no families or have been shunned by their families will be brought back to the center until other arrangements can be made.
“Tracy’s Heart Center is like a halfway house because our ultimate goal is to get them healed physically,” Buell said, “and get them accepted and set back up in their own villages with their own people … The hardest part and the main goal is to train the village people and the families of the rape victims to incorporate them back into their family situations.”
Warring factions have been using rape as a means of intimidation and domination. Entire communities of women are gang-raped with many cases ending in genital mutilation, unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases or death.
“It’s hard for [villages] because they don’t know what to do, and that is the main weapon of why they’re using rape in this way is because it breaks down their whole community,” Buell said, noting some women are raped in front of their children or neighbors.
Buell’s husband was in Africa for the opening and spoke. He told the community that it’s time for men to show women respect and to teach their children to show women respect, she said.
He also told the people that it’s OK for women to speak up if they were raped, and if a woman is being beaten by her husband, she should hit him back.
“… There’s no reason they have to live with that, and that does not go against their culture,” Buell said. “So we’re teaching them ‘You respect your husband, but he also has to respect you and you do not have to take a beating and you do not have to be quiet about a rape, you have to speak up.’”
As time goes by, Buell said they hope Tracy’s Heart Center won’t be needed to aid rape victims because the rapes will end, but if more rooms are needed for victims, they’ll add on to it.
The name for the center came after Tracy Miner of Terre Haute met some of the victimized women last May while in Africa with her husband, Doug, who was installing cables and building a computer network for the Buells.
Tracy Miner, 50, wanted to start with plans to help when she returned, but died three months after the trip from an enlarged heart. Donations poured in for the project in Miner’s memory.
Doug Miner was excited to hear about the progress of the center, but said the most important thing now is getting the funding to keep it open. He said he plans to go back within the next couple of years.
Although his wife is gone, Miner thinks his wife still had a hand in the center’s progress.
“She’s building quite the legacy and she’s not even around to enjoy it, and that’s not really her,” Doug Miner said about Tracy. “She really isn’t much for the limelight, but she just felt compelled after we got back.”
For more information about Tracy’s Heart Center, call (812) 238-2883 or visit www.tracysheartcongo.org.
Crystal Garcia can be reached at (812) 231-4271 or crystal.garcia@tribstar.com.
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