Beneficiaries of The Event
There are specific ways in which your participation on October 11th will be helping others.
The women and children of the Congo. It is hard to explain the long-term, mass torture and assault against the women and children of the Congo. The film clips from many news sources and the commentaries will break your heart*. The destructive violence in these assaults is such that women and children must have internal reconstruction to organs (if they survive). We will be donating 50% of proceeds to the Panzi Hospital, Bukavu, Congo, which is dedicated to this task. (Click here for more info: Congo)
The SANE SART (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner/Sexual Assault Response Team) program located at Mercy hospital here in Manhattan. This program ensures that rape victims receive the best possible treatment after an assault, and that evidence collection is done in a way that increases the ability to prosecute the crime. When clothing is collected for evidence, the crime victims are given a pair of sweats to wear home. We will be accepting new sweatpants and sweatshirts in women's sizes for donation to the SANE SART program. (Click here for more info about SANE SART: http://www.sane-sart.com/ )
The K-State Women's Center and the KSU student group, Wildcats Against Rape (WAR) are holding this fundraiser in part to raise money for continued education, training, and information distribution here in our community. We wish to bring speakers and trainers to K-State and continue to make informative materials available to everyone, toward the goal of promoting a nonviolent community and eliminating the horrific crime of sexual assault. (Webpage: http://www.k-state.edu/womenscenter/ )
Our community, ourselves as individuals, and hopefully those we will all educate by our words and actions after the event is finished: We change ourselves by helping others. We can help transform our community through this educational, cooperative event. (Click here for more on nonviolence: http://www.k-state.edu/womenscenter/NonviolenceWorks.htm )
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*According to the UN, 27,000 women were raped in the South Kivu Province in 2006, and “[t]he sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world." These rapes are particularly brutal: "Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair," wrote Jeffrey Gettleman , the East Africa bureau chief of the Times . "'We don't know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,' said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo's rape epidemic. 'They are done to destroy women.'" (From http://reversecowgirlblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/congo-rape-epidemic-and-what-you-can-do.html )