Nine-year-old Christine was on her way home from school when the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels abducted her in 1994. They marched her across valleys and forests, until she had no idea where she was. Her first “assignment” in the bush was to kill another abducted child, a boy who had been caught trying to escape. “I was forced to take a panga, cut off the boy’s head and hold it in my hand,” says Christine. The rebels awarded her to an officer as one of his wives. Everyday for ten years Christine wanted to return home to her village, but she feared what would happen if she was caught. She bore two children with the rebel officer before she got a chance to escape during a battle between the Ugandan army and the rebels. But even after she had returned home life was not easy: people often referred to her as ‘the mother of a rebel’s children’.
Sadly, Christine’s story is not unique in northern Uganda. In September, Uganda’s leading newspaper, the Sunday Vision, published an article about the plight of “child mothers”: women and girls who were used by rebels as “wives” – a misleading word that really means sex slaves. The UN estimates that between 1988 and 2004, about 10,000 young girls were kidnapped by the LRA, used as sex slaves, and subsequently bore rebels’ children. Even if these child mothers manage to escape from the LRA, when they return home, they are often rejected, as Christine was, even by close family members.
Christine has found practical help and support at the Patongo Youth Centre. The Centre offers skills training and mental health counseling to former child soldiers and young people who were abducted during the war. The Centre’s counselors are being trained by Network for Africa’s team of psychotherapists, who have been holding lay counselor training seminars in Africa for the past five years.
Other women like Christine are also being helped by the Patongo Counseling Community Outreach project, Network for Africa’s team of local lay Outreach Counselors. The counselors work in pairs – one woman and one man – making regular visits to 400 families in the Patongo area. Equipped with bikes, they can travel quickly and reach more people. In addition to providing much-needed counseling, including coping techniques for traumatized former child soldiers, the counselors offer advice to small village savings & loans groups. The project is also working with Slow Food International, to teach local people to create sustainable vegetable gardens.
The Sunday Vision points out that few charities work in rural Patongo and surrounding areas, leaving residents to fend for themselves amidst the ruins of a country that had been at war for 22 years.
By providing psychosocial support as well as practical tools to grow food and earn an income, Network for Africa is offering a bridge to a better life for rural northern Ugandans who survived the war.
An outreach counselor receiving her certificate of training course completion
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