A woman sits, microphone in hand, behind a billowing, black curtain—further obscured by a black veil that hides her face, her body, and even her hands—as she finds the courage to recount her rape by government soldiers in Minova, Democratic Republic of Congo.

The war in Congo is like a snake. Sometimes it slithers by and you see it and feel terror; other times, it hides in the trees, waiting. Everywhere I traveled in the country with the Nobel Women’s Initiative in February, I felt that ever-present fear—and exhaustion from so many years of being either attacked or on the lookout.

There were so very many stories. Stories of women physically torn apart, leaving stains of urine on chairs from fistula they suffered from violent rape. Stories about sexual enslavement that left teenage girls hysterically crying and unable to finish speaking. Stories of erasure—of women who had been left by their husbands and shunned by their own children because men had raped them.