Abu Dhabi and Abroad: Lessons from Uganda and Zanzibar

Lesson #6 – Empower and sustain

3/26 10:07p.m.

Victoria said many of her relatives wonder why she doesn’t sell her land and build a small, nice facility. But she stresses the importance of sustainability. If she sells her land, the money will eventually run out. With land, her children will always have space to play, she’ll be able to build rooms for more kids, open a business to bring in revenue. With her land, she can host interns and volunteers like myself, rather than having them pay to stay elsewhere. With land she can farm beans, maize, cabbage, mango, and bananas to feed the kids; raise cattle and livestock for milk, meat. With land, there is sustainability, longevity, independence, self-sufficiency, thus power.

3/31 9:15p.m.

About few weeks ago, after giving a report on the current issues in Uganda and identifying sexual violence as one of the major issues during Uganda’s recent war, Do, one of my male students, hesitantly asked, “Miss, why are women so weak?” I did not take offense to his question, but responded saying, “I think you are asking why women are so vulnerable.” I began to explain that women and children have always been more vulnerable, especially during times of conflict. And from my perspective, one of the reasons women are particularly vulnerable is because there is always something to take from us – sex.

Victoria shared several stories with me that I think support my response. One story is of a young girl whose mother had sex with an American Red Cross helper while in an Internal Displacement Camp (IDPC) to ensure she and her children received food and protection for survival. Another story was of a woman whose daughter was adducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The mother begged the government to find her daughter, and when she finally returned home she was pregnant after being repeatedly raped by Koni and/or his soldiers.

4/2

Today, Victoria took Heather and I to visit a woman she mentored. The woman was married to a much older man when she was a young girl, and eventually the man started sleeping with prostitutes and threatening to kick the woman and her children out of his home. She went to Victoria about this problem, and Victoria encouraged the woman to leave her husband and set-up a small farm on another plot of land. Through a program funded by the United Nations, Victoria taught this woman and other women in the community about self-sustainable farming. Through the program, women were taught how to use cow manure as fertilizer; how to build the cow stalls at a slope so to save their urine, mix it with ashes, and use it as natural pesticides; how to inter-mingle crops and about crop-rotation to keep the soil fertile and strong; how to remove dead banana fibers from the trees so water can reach their roots; how to sell some of the crops and milk from the cows, but re-invest profits to purchase more land, pay-off loans, or finance school fees.

While to you and I, this may seem small or even common sense, but through this program and Victoria’s encouragement, this woman does not have to turn to prostitution, nor a cheating husband, to support her. She can pay for her children’s school fees, as they are now in business and veterinarian schools. She is even supporting and raising her ex-husband’s grandchildren, because his children know their kids are better off with her than with their own father.

Through empowering women, entire families and communities are uplifted and empowered.