World Radio Day: Sr Angélique Namaika giving hope to women in DRC
(Vatican Radio) I am Lydia O’Kane. Over the years as a journalist I have had the privilege
to interview many women whose courage, commitment and determination have been a beacon
of hope in a world often beset by conflict and strife.
One of those women is
Sister Angélique Namaika who received the 2013 Nansen Refugee Award for her tireless
work in the remote north east region of the Democratic Republic of Congo with survivors
of displacement and abuse by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
The award was
established in 1954, to recognize extraordinary humanitarian work on behalf of refugees,
internally displaced or stateless people.
Displaced herself during the fighting
in the country in 2009, she runs the Centre for Reintegration and Development, which
has helped more than 2,000 women and girls who have been forced from their homes and
abused.
On this World Radio Day 2014 which has as its theme, giving a voice
to voiceless women, I have chosen Sister Angélique’s story.
She spoke to me
through a translator not long after the award was announced, saying she knew that
the Lord was helping her to help these women and it was he that gave her the courage
to start this initiative.
“The experience of me being a displaced [person]
was really not a happy experience, it was really a huge, a big trauma for me, all
the stories, all the atrocities we were hearing [about] were not easy to hear.” Sister
Angélique goes on to say that because she was so scared she began singing a song,
it was “Lord do what you want with me” This, she says “is also the song that gave
me courage to go out of the bush and to go back to the town to identify the women
who were displaced, the women who were traumatized ” She explains that because
of the trauma these women suffered, she accentuated her activities in terms of training
and in terms of income generating projects, so that she could help them rediscover
a happy life. Listen to Lydia O’Kane’s interview with Sister Angélique Namaika