Imagine: You hear men at the door one night. They drag your husband outside. As you watch through the window, they brutally kill him in cold blood. Then they move on to other houses.
Your nightmare has just begun. Leaving nearly everything but your baby behind, you flee in tears while you have the chance.
I know this is a brutal story. But it was the stark reality for Kasime, an adolescent mother from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) who was forced to flee her home last year amid rising violence.
Five years ago, Kalista had no hope for any kind of future. She had fled South Sudan’s civil war with her six younger siblings to the relative safety of Imvepi Refugee Settlement in northern Uganda. She escaped the violence of war. But sadly, at Imvepi she exchanged the threat of violence for the heartbreak of sexual exploitation.
As we reported in January, the enhanced agriculture training program we initiated last year in response to a growing hunger crisis within Imvepi Refugee Settlement produced remarkable results. A total of 200 adolescent girls participated. One of those students is Caroline. At harvest, her crop yield was more than impressive: 440 pounds of sorghum, over 600 pounds of maize, and more. Selling excess crops allowed her to buy clothes and bedding for her children, renovate her small thatched house, and purchase goats. And she has stored enough cereal grain to last her family until mid-May.
In Imvepi Refugee Settlement in northern Uganda, Africa’s hunger crisis was compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as severe international food relief cutbacks. In response, we initiated a hybrid agriculture program designed to provide the youth we serve in Imvepi supplemental food relief, while also giving them the training, tools, and supplies they needed to grow their own food. Now we are thrilled to announce that the agriculture initiative has proved to be a resounding success – and your support made this possible!
If you had asked Carolyn Baldwin a few years ago whether she thought her sewing skills would someday help young women half a world away stay in school, she might have shrugged you off with a laugh. In fact, that’s more or less how she reacted when Krista Brown, ChildVoice Donor Relations and Outreach Coordinator, first approached her about volunteering to help make reusable menstrual pad kits for ChildVoice’s THRIVE Program.
In May, I traveled to northeastern Nigeria with ChildVoice Board Member Mark Hoffschneider on an exploratory and fact-finding mission. Our goal was to determine the feasibility of expanding the ChildVoice model into areas of northern Nigeria in the hope of helping victims of the insurgency of the Boko Haram, an Islamist militant group operating in the region.
During a recent visit to the Lukome Center, I traveled with other ChildVoice staff to Imvepi Refugee Camp in Yumbe, Uganda (northwestern side), the newest camp for South Sudanese fleeing their country. It opened February 14, 2017, and already is home to more than 35,000 refugees. We went to register four of our South Sudan students who had joined ChildVoice before war broke out in their homeland. Once they graduate and leave the Lukome Center, they can't go back to their homes — people are dying in their home village of Yei every single day — so they have to officially register as refugees.
It’s always a happy day when we learn that the young girls who have graduated from ChildVoice’s Lukome Center in northern Uganda have secured good jobs within their community.
Newly launched Nguvu Dairy, whose tagline is “Yoghurt for a Strong Body,” has employed four former ChildVoice students at its busy production facility in Gulu. These girls are Gloria from Class 2, Rose and Evelyn from Class 3, and Paska, who graduated most recently with Class 6. The four girls started a little more than a month ago; three of them are working in production, and one is helping in the kitchen.
The dignity, value, and worth of all women has always been something close to my heart. Even before my college days at Wellesley, there were knots in the pit of my stomach and pain in my chest when I saw other women, especially young ones, mistreated, abused, oppressed, violated, or verbally belittled by others, all because they were “just a woman.” Yet living and working at the Lukome Center alongside young girls who are now teen mothers, whose entire lives have been filled with deep suffering from such negativity toward women, brings the inner discontentment to an entirely new level.
Uganda, a nation healing from deep traumatic suffering. A nation where 50% of its population is under the age of 15 because of previous massacres. A nation where everyone lived in constant fear of the rebel soldiers from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) just 10 years ago. A nation where survivors recall terrors during the night. A nation where daughters were taken as child brides, women and children raped, husbands slaughtered with machetes in front of their families, kids handed guns and forced to shoot their parents, and thousands of people displaced from their villages and loved ones.
Sitting under a mango tree at ChildVoice’s Lukome Center in northern Uganda, I listened to the stories told by ChildVoice counselors. One colleague told a sad war story which, much to my surprise, evoked many laughs. He must have noted my apparent confusion at the incongruous reaction and explained, “If we mourned all of those who died, we would die of sadness. Instead we laugh and tell their stories. This is how we honor them. It’s how we survive.”
By Presidential Proclamation, January is National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month, meant to shed light on the signs and consequences of this global tragedy. We at ChildVoice are all too familiar with the atrocities and abuses committed against young, vulnerable children who have been kidnapped or coerced into sexual slavery and forced labor. Here is the story of one such young South Sudanese girl, now at the Lukome Center, who was rescued from a childhood of prostitution.
Last week we announced the upcoming publication of Enduring the Night: Courageous Stories of Survival by Former Girl Soldiers. This book, compiled and edited by former ChildVoice interns, features the stories of several Lukome Centre graduates who were abducted as children by the Lord’s Resistance Army.
