news from Sophie in Northern Uganda

Greetings from Patongo, in the north east corner of Uganda. Ninety degrees and rather sticky. However, no complaints from this end because the Network for Africa team is really seeing the results of our efforts. We started work here in 2008, and this week we are completing our fifth visit by our team of 2 wonderful volunteer psychologists. They have now trained over 300 local people, including elders community leaders, former child soldiers, and vulnerable young people, in basic trauma counselling skills allowing people to learn to cope with the widespread trauma they have experienced.

Our psychologists have also trained a smaller group of smart, motivated local community members to be volunteer outreach counsellors (VOCs). We have trained the VOCs to help survivors of the brutal war identify their trauma, understand it and then manage it.

Thanks to the Warham family in London, the VOCs have bikes so they can provide counselling to ten communities in outlying rural villages - and their fame has spread. Now we've had requests for the VOCs to offer psychosocial help to people living with HIV.

Twenty three years of a vicious and devastating war left huge scars on this remote area of Uganda - emotional, economic and social scars - but we are encouraged to see such immediate progress. We thinl the main reason for our success is that we asked local people what they thought their biggest challenges were, and what their priorities are. And we keep asking them.

Here is what our partners say is most important:

1) The need to get people farming efficiently, especially the returning abducted child soldiers who need to provide for themselves. That means we need agricultural tools and training.

2) Health care. There are very few drugs avalaible, and two nurses struggle to see 100 patients a day.

3) Family planning. Unfortunately there is stigma attached, and we are working with local groups to provide education to younger people and to distribute condoms to more obscure areas.

4) Counselling services and health kits for people living with HIV. The rate of HIV here is almost three times the Ugandan average because of systematic rape during the conflict. For about £35 or $56 per kit we want to be able to provide condoms, a blanket, medicated soap, a jerry can, etc, for the very poor people living with HIV.

More from me soon. The VOCs say thank you to all who have so generously helped Network for Africa's work in their community.

Sophie McCann.

a very basic right

How to battle against the spread of HIV? Sadly it turns out that just teaching people about how HIV spreads is not enough. Why? Because it assumes that the women involved in any relationship have the power to say 'no.' Here is an example of how HIV spreads: a wife may be aware that her husband is infected, yet she will agree to dangerous sex with him because she fears he will deny her access to her own children. This happens all the time because in many societies a mother does not have the right to her own offspring. As soon as she gives birth, her child 'belongs' to her husband and his family. If she wants to keep seeing and being with her child, she is effectively at the mercy of the child's father. She has almost no power with which to negotiate. Hence the futility of telling people to abstain, when the woman has almost no rights whatsoever. There is a very fundamental problem underlying the social symptoms of powerlessness such as HIV and domestic abuse, etc. Women's status is very low, even in countries that pay lip service to women's rights, and where the government has enshrined women's rights within its constitution. The reality at village level among uneducated people is that women are unaware of their rights. Yet another reason to bring women one of the greatest gifts - literacy. That's why we are so proud of the partners with whom we work in Africa. They are providing women with the building blocks to realise their own potential and to take control of their lives.