Ugandan woman helps former child soldiers and rape victims
Women and children often rejected by their own communities
Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army terrorized northern Uganda for decades, abducting children, forcing them to commit brutal atrocities and shattering tens of thousands of lives in the process. Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe is helping some of Kony’s victims put their lives back together.
Nyirumbe, a sister with the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, runs a school and vocational training centre for girls and women in the northern Ugandan town of Gulu. She was recognized as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2014 and is the subject of a book and documentary titled Sewing Hope.
She will speak at Vancouver’s Orpheum Theatre on Tuesday as part of the Unique Lives lecture series. The Sun recently reached her by Skype in Oslo, Norway. Q What motivated you to establish this school? How did it come to be created?
A That school was already an existing school. It was meant for girls who dropped out of school due to the conflict in northern Uganda. Because in northern Uganda itself women are disadvantaged ... the society prefers boys and as (far as) education is concerned, they would prefer that boys go ahead. Girls ... were always prepared to get married ... so this school was started to promote women (so) they could at least be better housewives who can sew dresses and so forth. It was started in 1982. And then the war broke out in 1986 and, as you can imagine, the school lost its meaning completely. It is a school (that) could take 300 people, (but) because of war which was going on, there were only 30 girls there by the time I came to the school … in 2002. So in a way I started reviving the school, bringing in more structure, bringing in more ideas, but I became more focused on the disadvantaged women at the time.
Q How many women and girls live at the school? What kind of backgrounds do they come from?
A We every year are taking 250 girls … since 2002 until today, we have trained 2,000 of them or more. Most of these girls are girls who are deeply traumatized, girls who came from captivity, or girls who were (displaced) because of the war in northern Uganda. This is the first school … where women were accepted to come and study with their children. It was all because of the situation these women were exposed to. When they returned from captivity with the children, a lot of people did not accept them because ... the LRA brought these girls and these young children back to their communities and forced them to commit atrocities. Of course that was a tactical way of letting first of all the children not run away, knowing that the society would refuse them, would not accept them. But it was also really one way of making these children … frightened or even scared of returning. When the (girls) returned, a lot of people were afraid of taking them in, even their own parents. That’s why … I really thought it was wise to accept these (girls) in compassion and kindness, to let them come and study with their children together.
Q Tell me about what you teach these women and girls at the centre and what a normal day for them would look like.
A The normal day-to-day life is that in the morning, the girls go to school to join all other girls while they drop their children at the daycare ... I had to hire other elderly women to look after these children while their mothers were studying. We give them vocational skills training because a lot of them really dropped (out) from a primary level ... not dropped, but they were forced (out of school). So there was not much we could do … teach them basic reading and writing, literacy, and then give them dress making and cutting. We later on introduced also catering, which is really basic cookery, and at the end of the course a lot of them found jobs. Q How do you provide for them? Where does their food come from? Where does the money come from to support what you’re doing?
A We actually work very hard with these women. We have enough land, enough space and so everyone participates in agriculture. So some of the food which we feed them with we get from our garden but we also buy some of the food. For a long time we were receiving support from Scottish Catholic Aid … they were giving us some assistance, but that was in addition to what we were doing, because I totally wanted these girls and ourselves not to wait for donations. We’re training them in work ethics, saying we need to work hard, we need to make our own contributions. That’s one of the things (that) really attracted the Scottish Catholic Aid, to find that with the skills we were (teaching), dress making, we were sewing uniforms for other schools and we were getting income. And when we taught them basic cookery, we also became a catering class. We invite people from (outside) to come and have workshops in our centre and we provide the catering and of course they pay for the food. That was really bringing us income. And then during weekends we hire our premises to higher institutions of learning so they give us some income. When the Scottish Catholic Aid was giving us money — they stopped last year (after) eight years — it was on top of what we were producing financially and also materially, like our own foods, so they were adding on to that.