 Rwy'n nawr wedi gweithio'r gynhau rŵn dystiol yng nghylch yn ôl ar y Dados. Rydy'n meddwl hyn mae'n teimlo'r ddangos ond mae'n gwnau hunain, a fyddwn yn teimlo'n glas yn ddifigŷl o'r gyfnoddau hynny i fi oedd hi wedi'i gynnig ac i nhw, dydag yn wneud cynniad o'r bri Cabinet Gweld. Os ydych chi'n mwynlekwm a rydyn ni wedi'n meddwl i'r gwmw Howard O declaration clywed o'r gwnaeth oherwydd yma. A mae hwn wedi'i gynnig o'r ddechrau'r ei wneud yn ychydig yn y chaimbr ythafod o'r bobl. Mae'r ddweud o'r ffordd iawn, sy'n cymdeinio'r cyfle, sy'n cymryd i'ch bod yma'r ddweud yn diwyllus cymryd a chael i'r rhan o'ch wneud a chael i'r cyfnodau sydd wedi'u cydweinio'r cyfnodau sydd yn ychydig yn byw. A yw'r bobl yn amlŷwyr. describe a issue but when it comes to humanising that data and storytelling one often lack the proper resources to do that and then you've also on the other side got the global media whereas there global media institutions are frequently disrupted and when it comes to investing heavily in human stories they often lack the resources to do that too. Felly, dwi'n cael ei ddweud eich bod yna'r cwestiynau, ym mwyaf yw yw'r next Martin Luther King, ym mwyaf yw'r next Gandhi, ym mwyaf yw'r next Mandela, ym mwyaf yw'r next Heroes, leaders of our societies, for good reasons, who are actually household names, the ordinary people like myself would know. Now, probably even in this room of enlightened people, even we wouldn't be able to come up with more than one or two names who are household names. Now, the great emerging leaders are out there and they're doing great work, but their stories and their messages are getting lost in this white noise and they're not seeing their voices aren't heard. So, this is where someone like myself comes into it. I'm a storyteller and I have a foundation called the People's Portfolio and our job is to invest all our resources purely into storytelling. So, we look at these fantastic emerging leaders now and we try to give them an enhanced platform of leadership. We try to give them a megaphone so their voices break through this white noise that we're all experiencing. So, there's one leader that I'd love to tell you about today. He's been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize eight times. He's time 100 and yet still many of us don't know his name. His name is Dr Dennis Macquage. So, he's a well-renowned gynaecological surgeon and around 1999 he set up a small hospital in Bukavu in South Kivu province eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Now, the mission for this hospital was to help local women have natural healthy childbirths in a poor region and one of his first patients ended up being something different. She came to the gates of the Pansy hospital and she needed extreme emergency help. She was suffering from being raped with extreme violence. So, they operated on her and treated her hoping that this was a fluke. Tragically, it wasn't a fluke and it was the beginning of what we now call an epidemic of rape as a weapon of war. Now, every day on average, there's between one and 15 women that come to the gates of the hospital seeking treatment for sexual violence. To give you a sense of scale to this date since its inception, the hospital has treated 85,000 women, children and even babies as young as two months old for sexual violence with extreme violence. So, the doctor is my friend. I got to know him quite well over the last few years and he came to me for help and he said, can you help me get this story out? But not in a statistical way, the way it's been presented before, but in a human way. And he invited me and my team to the Congo to set up a studio in his hospital and help humanize this unbelievable story. So, with your kind permission, I'd like to tell you about the trip that we did and it begins here. The Congo River Basin is the second largest rainforest in the world. So when we breathe every breath we take, we take in Congo. Every breath we take anywhere in the world, we're breathing air that was made in Congo. So we all have a stake in this. So, day one. I wake up on my first day of the trip. Our hotel is on Lake Kivu. So I walk down to the water's edge as the sun's coming up and I'm in paradise. I hear tropical birds singing, beautiful plants everywhere. I look out onto Paradise Lake and in the distance I see a group of night fishermen finishing their night shift as sun rises. I can actually hear them singing songs to the fish. One of them paddles over to me in a canoe that he carved out of an old tree. And he says, my name is Zeus. I climb into his boat and I take this picture. I said, Zeus, you live in paradise. I'm from New York. I've never seen such a beautiful place. And he said, you're wrong, my friend. It's beautiful to look at, but my personal life is nothing but darkness. He said, when I was a child growing up, I witnessed both my mother and father killed in front of me with machetes. He said, I'm looking for a better life. So, in an hour or so, it was time to hit the roads and go in our convoy to the hospital to meet Dr Macquage. As we're driving on the streets, my fixer told me that the DRC has a $24 trillion economy based on natural resource wealth. And as I looked out of my window of the car, I saw nothing but abject poverty. The roads were devastated and I just thought to myself, my goodness, I don't think any of that money is going to the people. But I did see this poster of Dr Macquage in a shop and I jumped out of the car to get a picture of the doctor's image amongst his people. So, we eventually made it to the gates of the hospital where all these women and children arrive each day. And I was greeted in open arms by my all-time hero. Here he is. This is the portrait that I made within an hour of meeting him at the hospital. Now, he's a man exhausted with the fight against rape as a weapon of war. And yet when he's in the hospital doing what he was born to do, it's like he's 200% alive. And this is an icon that I hope the hospital will use to help amplify his voice around the world. And I said to him, doctor, what makes you happy? And he said, my happiness is in the happiness of others. If I can lift a soul or a spirit, then I myself can be happy. So, after I finished working with the doctor, this young lady came into my little photo studio that I set up. I'll introduce you to her. Her name is Esther and this is her one-year-old son, Jose. I asked Esther to tell me her story. So, she said, well, when I was 16 years old, she said she was fetching water for her mother and father in a rural area outside Bukavu. Some troops, rebels called FDLR, they abducted her, grabbed her and pulled her into a forest and had their base camp. They tied her to a tree and they all raped her for four days. On the fourth day, one of the rebels forgot to tie the ropes tight and she managed to escape. She made it to a local village and a man rescued her and brought her into his home for safety. But then he raped her as well. Eventually she escaped again and made it to the gates of the Pansy hospital to find out that she's now pregnant from the rape. Over a year later, here is her son, Jose. He's calm and staring at me probably because she gave him a little bit of bread in his hand that he once in a while chews on in the picture. Now, when she told me this, as I'm sure you're feeling, I was devastated and I found it really difficult to keep my composure. Look at her face. She kept this stoic dignity as she told me this horrific story. She asked, how is it that you don't cry in my picture? I've never heard a story like this before. And she said, the reason I don't cry in your picture is because I don't want to make you sad. And I don't want to make anybody sad who sees this picture. She said, my mommy and daddy always told me when I was a child that I am here to bring joy to the world and I will keep my promise. So we finished this picture and then I heard some noise outside this little booth that I'd set up so I came outside to be confronted by this. This is the singing women of the Pansy hospital. It's a multi-generational group and they come together every day and they write songs and they sing songs about their adversity. One girl here is 13 years old, another lady is in her 70s. It's the most beautiful evidence of sisterhood I ever saw in my life. And it's a sort of defiance of darkness. So I took them into the courtyard of the hospital and as the sun came out I got these sort of powder puff clouds. It was beautiful with the light and they started singing and dancing. And it just reminded me of the strength that we have as human beings to overcome the worst adversity if we support each other and come together. Everywhere I went in the hospital I saw women, children. I saw more children who were orphaned. I saw babies born of rape. But overall this hospital is a beautiful place of healing. Now as I photographed many women who are survivors of sexual violence I obviously didn't speak their language so we had to communicate in a different way. And once in a while they did something or I asked them to move their head slightly to one side and it just created one of those powerful images that I lived to take. And when they recognized my inspiration they would all do something very similar. They would make a sound that was this. Brothers and sisters, this is the best sound I ever heard in my life. It's the sound I live for as a photographer because it's a sound of a deep connection with someone that I don't even speak their language. So I spoke to a lady called Dr Nene who's another surgeon at the hospital and I was interested in this sound and I asked her about why these women make this beautiful sound of confidence. She explained to me that the woman in fact to use her words, the African woman, she is a strong one. She said she is seen as the matriarch of not only the family but the whole community. She rears the children, she feeds them, she inspires them with wisdom and educates them. She's also the biggest advisor to her husband but outside the family unit she's expected to be reserved. Yet she is still the best spiritual advisor for the family in public so she has invented a secret language of subtle noises so she can still let her husband know and her children know what she's thinking. So I said well what would be the noise for joy and she did what some of the women had done when they were dancing. She did well when there's a new baby born that's healthy in the family we do this noise. So then I said what would the noise be for a warning to her children or anxiety and she did this. So then I asked a difficult question what is the noise of a woman who feels pain. She did this. Then I asked a question about vulnerability. What does a woman do when she feels vulnerable? She said once again a woman in Africa is strong. She has no sound for vulnerability because she's not supposed to be vulnerable. When she's vulnerable there is silence. So I was invited into a hospital ward filled with 30 women or recovering from sexual violence and there was silence. No noise. In fact as I walked into this room for the first time in my life I felt what it really is to be a man and it didn't feel good. I was standing in this ward and I felt predatorial on top of it I had a camera as well and I was rendered useless as a communicator for fear of offending and making the women feel even more vulnerable. Yet I was invited there by the hospital to help tell you guys this story. So the only way I could function was to tune in on a human way with the doctor who was doing his rounds that morning and I asked him to give me a little nod if it was okay for me to take a picture. But if he felt it's sensitive I would lower my camera and bow my head and stand in the corner. So I worked with another NGO also called Physicians for Human Rights and they've done incredible work in this hospital because what they've started to do is get the doctors to talk to the police force who also talk to the military tribunals. Now when a doctor treats a woman there's also evidence of her injuries so they pass on the evidence to the police who then arrest the perpetrator and then they pass on the perpetrator with that evidence to the military tribunal and only now can we start to close the circle of justice. This is Captain Budelli, he's head of police in South Kivu and he's one of the most courageous guys I've ever met and he's made it his life's mission to fight rape as a weapon of war. So look I'm an outsider, I've never been to the Congo before so I had to ask him a very basic question. I don't understand what rape as a weapon of war even means and he said it's brutally simple my friend, bullets cost money, rape is free. He also confirmed what Dr Nene has said to me that the woman in Africa is the central axis of strength in the family and in the community so if you hurt the woman you disrupt her confidence in life you break down the family unit. Even her husband feels humiliated because he couldn't defend her honour so he feels lacking in strength. Now if that permeates a whole society, society feels vulnerable and weak, they're less likely to stand up to oppressive rebels. Rebels are then able to control territory and if you control territory in the ground there are so many semi precious minerals that come from mines and these semi precious minerals power our mobile devices so if we all thought this is a distant struggle we suddenly begin to realise that our empowerment makes us stakeholders in this story because a large percentage of the semi precious minerals that empower us come from the Congo. So the captain has made it his life's mission also to recruit women for the first time into the police force because they're much better equipped emotionally to deal with this delicate subject of rape. And here he is on a police march with all his lady soldiers behind him. But there are some problems with recruitment in the Democratic Republic of Congo as I heard. Now this guy was a former child soldier and a former rebel but he's now a policeman but he's wearing a jacket from when he was a rebel and it's starting to get difficult to tell who is a good guy and who is a bad guy. Here are a gang of police I photographed at the police station just one random morning this is a bullet wound in one of their hand. Now I heard rumours when I was there there's been a lot of recruitment of rebels into the police force which is I suppose a positive development but the danger is that some of these rebels keep their uniform under their bed so during the day they police the streets but at night time they switch uniforms become a rebel again and devastate the same streets they were policing during the day. This is a rebels weapon a machete this is the gate to hell this is a police jail and the jail cell these are the only elements of light that come into the dark room and behind it are a whole group of men accused of sexual violence. The whole place stank they were burning rubber tyres in the courtyard and as I walked in I remember seeing this little boy who was having a seizure on the floor and he was banging his head against the concrete. You know he wasn't well and the local hospital didn't want to take him he was an orphan so he was just left at the police station till they figured out what to do. And there were maggots everywhere and weird spiders and then the darkness of the feeling of these eyes coming through the holes. I've never seen darkness like this before in my life. So we decided to hit the streets again and we headed in my convoy into the mining district because we wanted to find out about the mines themselves. Now I discovered after driving about 130 miles north into rebel territory and this was very dangerous area I found some great news. There's a local charity in the area where there are tin mines that pumps money into local families and that allows families to take their children out of the mines and put them into a school. I arrive at a local school and I'm confronted with maybe two or three hundred children and all their parents and teachers and just for the record I asked everybody to raise their hand if they ever worked in a mine. Every single person in this picture worked in a mine. Most of the parents still do and the children ranged from five years old to 14. This little girl was six years old. She was so beautiful, has this beautiful openness as a soul and I love her earrings. This is a 14 year old boy with his mother. These three little girls, this is their classroom so you can see how basic it is. This is the floor. Notice the t-shirt. She was given it from a local charity shop that collects clothes from our part of the world and she had no idea what the Playboy Bonnie was. She thought it's a bunny rabbit and then these are all the children I photographed that morning as an epic line up of heroes trying to defy their circumstances of adversity. So I wanted to meet some of the miners so I met this lady and her name is Vivian. She's the mother of four children. She's been a miner since she was 11 years old. She saw her husband killed in front of her by militia rebels from the FDLR and they told me that they opened fire on her as she fled with her children and the baby that she was carrying on her back got hit by one of the bullets. The baby survived but remained severely handicapped. None of her children go to school. She's a miner in a mine called the Mokongwe Mine and as far as I can tell it's a gold mine. It's one of the most fought over mines in South Kivu. I was told that there's about 5,000 miners there and according to OECD there's extreme corruption, there's rebel activity, lots of children work in this mine and it's rife with sexual violence. Then I wanted to find a mine of positivity because I have heard that there is change and we need hope to cling to with this story. So I put the word out to see if there are any mine owners that have registered mines that are conflict free, no women, no children. This man stepped forward who owns a coffee plantation and he's recently discovered coltan and tin on his land. So he's opened up a brand new mine called the Luwango Mine and he invited me and my team to go there to take pictures freely. This is coltan in the ground. Coltan is one of the minerals so you have gold, tin, tantalum, cobalt and coltan. These are the minerals that power our technology. This is one of the miners I pulled out of a ground in a ditch. This is a miner holding a rock with coltan in it and the coltan of the black bits in the rock. Here is another miner. All the dirt dries in the heat after they've been digging in the ditch and it creates this unbelievable texture on the skin. This guy's name is Prince and he was just so beautiful in front of the camera. So then they break down the rocks and create refined coltan and that's what's being held in the hand here. Now in a mine that's corrupt what they do is they put this in sacks and they smuggle it out through a porous border and then it's smelted down in Southeast Asia and then distributed and eventually it finds its way into our mobile technology. But it's almost impossible to trace the supply chain. Here is a miner again covered in mud and this is my apocalypse now picture. This is the mine. So I was so excited when I got this picture because it's evidence of a positive mine, positive change and we risked our lives doing this picture with my team. I mean I brought all my young assistants and all their parents were slightly pissed off at me for exposing them to this danger. So when we got back we thought we should do some fact checking and some caption and expansions and we started researching this online and you know what we couldn't find any evidence that this mine even exists. We looked on all the websites that list all the conflict free mines no one had ever heard of this mine. So I was left with a difficult situation. Is it a real mine? I was there. I pulled these miners out of the ground. I think it was. Or is it a ghost mine? Could it have been set up by the government to throw me off course and give me the impression to tell the world that there's great positive change when maybe there isn't? Now if I was a great journalist and most of my friends are journalists I would be slightly reluctant to engage with this picture for fear of publishing a picture when you can't verify the truth. No one wants to publish fake news these days. But the danger is that if we don't engage in this picture because as journalists we're looking for straight facts in the fog of a conflict like the Congo there almost are no straight facts. The only straight fact I can find is that there are 85,000 women being treated in a local hospital over the last few years because they have the evidence of their treatment. So the danger is the media don't want to talk about it. The tech companies that empower us they don't want to talk about it either because they can't guarantee their supply chains are often clean. So it remains an invisible conflict. And we the people don't even realize that we might well be stakeholders in this story. So I'm going to end here. This is Sandra. Sandra was raped when she was 16. She made it to the gates of the pansy hospital only to find that she was pregnant and she had a miscarriage at the hospital. Then they found out she was HIV positive. But Sandra refuses to be a victim. She's become an advocate, a supporter of other women who have been through this adversity. She now writes songs and sings them and releases them out on local radio stations to inspire women and children who have been through this adversity. And I heard that she had written one song that was very powerful and I asked her to sing it for me and with your kind permission I would like to read you the words from the translation. This is Sandra's voice. The song is called My Body is Not a Weapon. If you look at me, you will see a woman who is smiling. A soul full of joy. And when you meet me on the street, you will never know that my heart is in pieces and my dreams are broken. In my world I am only average to hurt more. No, no. My body is not a weapon. My body is not their weapon. I also have a dream. I want to change everything. Within me a small president is hidden. Who would change all inequalities. Within me a small lawyer is hidden. Who would defend all the oppressed. A female doctor, a soul of joy. A soul that will link the north and the south. And if I don't make it, Mr photographer, can you ask someone to please change the world for me? Thank you for listening.