A few minutes after the Nobel committee announced that Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad had been awarded the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize, it was impossible to get anyone at Mukwege’s hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo to the phone. Not because the lines were down, but because the jubilant cheers, drumming, whistle blasts and singing were so loud no one could speak.
Instead, Dr. Neema Rukunghu, a gynecologist and medical coordinator who has worked at Mukwege’s hospital for the past 10 years, held her cellphone up to the crowd gathered in the hospital’s courtyard, who whooped and laughed as TIME listened. She promised to speak when things had calmed down. It took a while.
“’Finally’, everyone is saying ‘finally,’” she eventually said of the decision to award the Nobel Prize to Mukwege and Murad for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict. “This is the moment we finally get to shine a big light on the abuses of rape in war. This isn’t just..