{UAH} A global voice for rural women and girls - Full Woman - monitor.co.ug
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A global voice for rural women and girls - Full Woman - monitor.co.ug
11 am Saturday morning finds me at Bukasa trading Centre, bordering the affluent Muyenga neighborhood. The boda boda men are busy at the stage; the local women are occupied in their stalls selling charcoal, tomatoes, onions, and many other foodstuffs. I take shelter from the scorching sun under the shade as I wait for the girl that was sent to pick me up at the stage.
She arrives 15 minutes later, wearing a light green blouse over a grey skirt. She is sweating; it must be the January heat. Sabina Achola, as she introduces herself on the walk back home to meet "her mother", tells me she will be joinging Senior Six this year at St Noah Girls school.
But about four years ago, Achola would not have been so certain about her education. But about three years ago when she was in Senior Three, a special lady picked her from the village and brought her to the city to study.
Today, she does not have to worry much about her education beyond her performance. That special lady she refers to as mother is Beatrice Achieng Nas, who runs Pearl Community Education Foundation, a local NGO, of which Achola is a beneficiary, among many other girls.
Achieng has an office at home overlooking Lake Victoria in Bukasa, a Kampala surburb, from where she looks after these girls and also coordinates all her work. We find her seated in her freshly painted office in an adjacent structure next to her house.
She smiles briefly as she ushers me and shows me to a seat, before dismissing Achola.
Borrowing from her hollow past
"That young lady is one of the rarest people we have in this country," Kennedy Adhola, the resident district commissioner of Tororo district, asserts.
"Apart from sending the girls to school, she also spares time to counsel parents and teachers on how to handle teenage girls back home," he adds. She may be the director Pearl Community Education (PCE) Foundation today, but life was not a bed of roses.
Achieng was born to Alweny Nosiata and the late Lazarus Obbo in Kisoko, Tororo District. She grew up in rural Tororo in a polygamous family of 12 children, where her mother had got married at just 12 years of age.
Achieng narrates that she was forced to work in bars, at the risk of being raped by men who were suspected of being HIV positive who used to make a pass at her. "I would wake up at 5am to serve these old men alcohol and sleep at 3am after the last one has left," she narrates.
"I worked to raise money to help me get through school. I decided to go back home and work in the garden with my mum. I managed to study up to Senior Four. I then sat home because there was no money to study," she recalls.
But in 1999, a cousin told her about an American woman who was helping educate girls. "I wrote to her in October 1999, but she only replied in January 2000. She said she was willing to support me," narrates a teary Achieng.
She joined City High School in Kampala in 2001 and had to walk over six kilometers to school every day from Bweyogerere where she was staying with her older brother.
"Soon my brother, who had just moved in with his girlfriend said I was an inconvenience and should leave his house," she recalls.
Scraping together the little cash she had and favours here and there, Achieng rented a tiny room in Kireka, a Kampala suburb. "Sometimes, I would just drink water because there was not a penny left to buy food," Achieng recounts.
Luckily, she passed and won a scholarship from the Carnegie Foundation to join Makerere University in 2004 to study Information Technology. "After one semester, someone lied to the organisation that I was from a well-off family and it stopped sponsoring me," she narrates. She sought the assistance of her former sponsors who agreed to see her through University.
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