I was thin, hungry and exhausted, my fears were endless. I am not that person anymore. My kids are happy. They eat, they go to school. People used to look down on me, now they look up tome
Money raised in Scotland is helping to transform lives in a deprived African country which has been ravaged by the AIDS epidemic
YThe respect I get now has changed how I feel LYDIA KYEBALYENDA ON HOW HER LIFE HAS CHANGED SINCE OPENING HAIR SALON
OU cannot compare me now to the person I once was,” says Lydia Kyebalyenda. “I was thin, hungry, exhausted and my fears were endless. I am not that person any more.”
Lydia is in her hair salon in a village in Mukono in eastern Uganda, teasing the tangles from a client’s hair.
The 26-year-old has flesh on her bones and a comfort in her own skin which belies the trials she has endured.
The salon’s steel doors are open to breathless, 40C air and children have gathered, intrigued by the spectacle.
They are unkempt and barefoot, trapped as they are in one of the most deprived corners of the Earth.
When Lydia was their age, her peasant farmer parents saw their eight children pained with hunger and malaria.
They survived on government centre handouts of maize, porridge and beans.
The basics of a uniform, books and paper rendered “free” schooling prohibitively expensive.
She was 16 when she fell pregnant to a man visiting from another village and her outraged parents sent her away with him to be married.
She saw them only once again before they both died in 2009 from AIDS and her only solace is that they were reconciled.
Mukono is an HIV blackspot. It has a 28 per cent infection rate in some areas and 42 per cent of young people in the region have lost both parents to the disease.
Lydia’s husband left her for a mistress when the youngest of her three children was three months.
She also took on her widowed sister’s two children after her sibling could no longer care for them.
Faced with the family’s starvation, she dug gardens and was paid in potatoes, cassava roots and a dollar a week.
She said: “I lost so much weight – we were surviving on boiled potatoes.
“I worked through the day, walked three miles to tend the children, then worked again in the evenings.
“I was exhausted and I was so
frightened for the children. I couldn’t see a future for them.”
But in January 2017, hope arrived thanks to Caritas Lugazi – a local partner of the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund (SCIAF).
They enrolled her in a project promoting sustainable livelihoods among underprivileged youth in the area.
With donations collected in Scotland, they supplied her with banana combs, maize seeds and beans, and the equipment to farm them in a small patch of land in an area of government forest.
Crucially, the project helped young people form collectives, to bargain direct with markets instead of losing profits to middle men.
With the profits from her crops and support from the project’s savings and loans scheme, she was able to amass enough to pay for hairdressing training.
She grew a roster of loyal customers from a mobile salon and was earning three times in an hour what she once did in a week.
Last year, she realised her dream of opening her own salon. It sits in a red dirt street, in a village of circular mud huts. With two hair weaves, she can now earn more than £4, which means her children can go to school and are well-fed.
They all sleep in a small, thatched hut with poor access to sanitation and water but Lydia is confident of progress.
She said: “My life has changed significantly. I don’t worry the same and know that I can grow the business and make life even better for us.
“The children are happy. They go to school, they are dressed, they eat and are like other children.
“The respect I get now has changed how I feel. People used to look down on me. Now, they look up to me.”
Not far along a bumpy forest road, 30 miles east of the Ugandan capital Kampala, the intervention of SCIAF has been just as transformative for Christopher Kibunga, 26, who was six when he and his older sister were orphaned by AIDS.
A family friend took them in, bringing their family to nine.
He said: “They tried but we were a burden. There was no one just for us. I missed my parents so much. I cried a lot.”
As a teenager, he returned to the crumbled, abandoned remains of what had been his family home.
He took a job in a local sand mine which paid 74p a day for punishing work – digging sand and hacking weeds in clawing heat.
Christopher said: “The days were long and I couldn’t afford to eat. I was sick and sore all the time. It was terrible.”
To numb his day, he drank cheap “Waragi”, a locally distilled gin.
With no access to sanitation and malnutritioned, he had regular bouts of malaria, stomach aches and diarrhoea. One tablet to cure diarrhoea would have cost him four days’ wages.
He admits that when he married and had a child, he was violent and she fled, leaving him with his two-year-old son.
When his sister was widowed, he took in her children of seven and nine and they would sometimes go hungry – until two years ago the SCIAF project intervened.
They gave him tomato seeds, maize and banana combs, agricultural tools and a bike and he farmed at the family home which had an acre of uncultivated land.
The project gave him counselling for trauma, addiction support and anger management taught him to look after his new profits.
His wife has now returned and at last he has the family he craved.
In a four-month season, he was able to grow four boxes of tomatoes a week, with just one batch making him seven times his daily wage in the sand mine.
He said: “It was so exciting to leave the sand mine and see the money coming in.”
Christopher is a natural entrepreneur and his success has built rapidly.
Within one year, he had saved £200 and bought a motorbike, which he rents as a taxi for £2 a day.
He has now built a home with solar panels and a toilet and is one of 40 beneficiaries of the project to have received a piglet, which are then bred and shared in the collective.
He is chair of the youth development group, helping pool resources and advocating for government land entitlements.
He said: “Now, I use my head instead of my sweat. If I need labouring done, I hire it. I never thought I’d live this life. I am so grateful for it.”