A Crown of Beauty in Bukavu

In 1999, Dr. Denis Mukwege opened Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, a city in eastern Congo scarred by decades of armed conflict. He expected to practice routine gynecology. Instead, his first patient was a woman who had been shot in her genitals. Then came another. Then hundreds. Then thousands. Sexual violence had become a weapon of war. What Mukwege built at Panzi was not merely a surgical ward.…