I want to share a story from one of my earlier trips to Uganda. It was back in 2007 and I travelled with Mike and Allison from Caerphilly. We had arranged to partner with a school/home for older children. The home was made up of former street kids, all aged 13-20 years old.
We’d been to this home before and done a lot of outreach work and football activities. This year though I wanted to do more. I wanted to use my skills as a youth worker to try and educate the young people, especially the girls, into living a safer lifestyle.
The home is located on the Ugandan-Kenyan border. When I go there, the place gives me a feeling of uneasiness. Being a border town, there is a lot of coming and going. Trucks line up along the road, waiting to pass through the border crossing. People walk across the border, carrying goods, livestock, money and ultimately drugs. There is a bad feel to the place. There are drunks on the streets, a high police/guard presence and you feel like you’re vulnerable being there. By night, the place comes to life even more. The street sellers are out, the trucks park up for the night and there is a busyness to the town.
It’s a depressing town.
The immediate landscape is grey and dark. On the horizon you see the Kenyan mountains and all their beauty, but here, you walk passed rubbish dumps and the smell in the air could make you sick. Sewerage litters the sides of the roads. One time, the heavens opened and the rain had no place to go other than the road and so we walked, up to our knees, in the water/sewerage flood.
There are no street lights here so lose sunlight and you enter an abyss of darkness. You walk as carefully as you can, trying to avoid the sewerage troughs at the side of the dirt track road, as well as keeping looking out for cows and goats, who casually walk next to you.
Some nights you feel the only safe thing to do, is return to your room and lock the door. Being out after dark here is not safe at all.
And yet, a few metres up the road live these children. These children, for whom this is a daily reality. These children, whose lives are deemed better now that they are ‘safe’ in this institution.
The children here are certainly survivors. They have to be to live here.
In 2007 I decided to do some work with the young people here about safe relationships. Aids is rife in this area, mainly due to the prostitution rates. This seemed like a valuable life lesson for these young people to keep themselves and others safe.
And so we started our workshops. We started off in a light-hearted manner. Relationships of any kind were frowned upon by the home staff. Young people could be disciplined severely for showing an interest in someone of the opposite sex. We had to build up a trust with these young people before they would start opening up and talking to us. We knew there were relationships as we had stayed amongst the young people one night, and had caught glimpses of hand holding and young people sneaking from their rooms to meet up with others. The staff could deny them this right by any means, but these young people know how to work a system. They have already lived through more than any of us could imagine. They knew how to meet up in secret. They knew how to avoid getting caught. Ultimately they were teenagers, with feelings and emotions inside them that they wanted to pursue.
So we built their trust by making the ideal boyfriend and girlfriend. We chalked around one girl and one boy on the dusty floor, and then let them start designing. The girls and boys split in to smaller groups to focus on their perfect partner. It was wonderful to hear them be teenagers, to giggle and snigger and shout and get embarrassed. They laughed so hard as they thought of physical features they would want. The mood quietened when we turned our attention to the things inside; personality, character, beliefs, morals. They had such brilliant discussions around this. It was amazing to see them drop their guard and talk openly about relationships they knew of or had had.
The following day we returned and I held a workshop just for the girls. Mike took the boys to play football and it seemed the perfect time to see the girls alone. Mike also instilled in the boys the value of relationships. Him and Allison modelled their own marriage and parenting of their own three children, to share remarkable stories with the young people. (Not for you to think the boys were forgotten about).
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| Mike and Allison in Uganda 2007 - My Maama and Papa in Uganda |
The girls were eager to attend. (At this point I could digress to all manner of topics the girls raised. For this blog I will recall only one.) They were all forthcoming with questions and examples.
We played a quiz, where the girls had to answer the questions by standing in either the true part of the room or the false part. They LOVED this and it brought out so much to discuss later.
I was fascinated by their answers. The thing that stuck me the most was how against prostitution and sex before marriage they were. Abstinence is advocated so much in Uganda, I really had this feeling that it had reached these girls and they were abstaining and ultimately stopping unwanted pregnancies, transmitting HIV and inevitably preventing more babies being abandoned. Me in my little naive world I guess!?!
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| A typical Ugandan poster for young people |
Then reality hit......
Question – It is ok to have sex with a man if he gives you money you need for school fees. True or false?
There was no thinking it over time, they all ran to which side of the room they wanted to be in!
They all ran to:
TRUE!
It was a case of let them explain their answer and then educate, educate, educate.
Not one of the girls thought of this as prostitution but as a means for getting a better life.
My heart literally broke there and then.
They had their priorities right!
They knew education was the key to a successful life.
They were prepared to give ALL of themselves for this opportunity.
If no one provided school fees they would find them by whatever means possible. If that meant prostituting themselves, then that is what they would do. They saw the light at the end of the tunnel. That light was success in education, leading to a job, leading to a home and leading to a comfortable life.
These girls were in such a vulnerable situation, based solely on circumstances, that they would risk their future for the BIGGER picture in their eyes. They would use the only thing they had to get what they felt they needed.
Not one had contemplated getting HIV/AIDS from this sexual encounter. Not one had considered their safety in terms of being attacked or raped. Not one had taken into account how they would cope with an unwanted pregnancy.
These girls then shared with us how this happens all the time in this area. You see those trucks that I mentioned at the beginning of this blog? – well those drivers are stranded on the border most nights. The trucks stop literally across the road from the home. There are no fences or barriers stopping access between the truck drivers and the girls. Need I say more?
These beautiful girls make this choice to get the things they need.
Another ‘wonderful’ disadvantage of being institutionalised.
They may have school fees partly paid for by sponsorship programmes, but there are other things that the costs don’t cover. There are no parents they can go and ask for some money off. There is no extended family they can go too. There are few jobs available to them.
They HAVE only one choice.
One choice they shouldn’t have to make.
One choice that could literally change their future forever.
These girls deserve so much more than this one choice. They are entitled to so many choices, according to the UNCRC, but who’s there for them? Who makes sure they know these rights? Who enforces the rights? Who can speak on their behalf? Who bothers to listen?
You do the sums:
POVERTY = VULNERABILITY
POVERTY = LACK OF CHOICES
POVERTY = RISK TAKING
POVERTY = BEING TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF!
+ INSTITUTIONALISATION = ?????
