Women Peace Keepers

I am currently writing this from my new favorite place. I had previously enjoyed the view from the top of crater hill but yesterday I decided to get adventurous and climb hospital hill by myself. This “trail” takes the climber up an impossibly steep face (scrambling is required) and once at the first plateau it is possible to see the three volcanoes, the hospital, and most of Kisoro including my compound. Then you head up another grassy climb and traverse the ridge to find yourself overlooking lake Mutanda. So this is where I am coming to you guys from, sitting on the grass overlooking the lake. It is unlike anything I have ever seen.

If I were more of a poet I could come up with something about how the people in this area break my heart and the mountains put it back together again but I guess I will just tell you about what I have done so far this week. Yesterday, we went back to the Congo refugee camp. When we pulled in I could already see that there were new tents and more people. The population has swelled to nearly one THOUSAND people there. Our assignment was to give talks about STIs and HIV and to discuss safe sexual practices. In the past, after giving this talk, women shared with Andrea (4th year) some horror stories about rape and violence that they had encountered in the Congo. This inspired her work and future projects and she is working to establish a database or something similar pertaining to human rights violations among refugee populations. We did not have a similar experience yesterday, just some of the men asked Maddie (in French) about how they could obtain condoms. When we asked if people had questions for us they raised their hands and asked if we could speed up transports because the camp is too crowded (we cannot control that) or if we could do something about getting sugar for the porridge (again, not our area of work).

Today I went on a psych outreach with Immaculate. Immaculate is a nurse at the hospital who also runs outreach programs and organizes AA meetings and I am sure this does not even cover all of what she does. We drove (in a car!) to a village healthworker’s home where we met a group of about 20 women. Immaculate explained that they had planned on doing mental health talks in the community on various topics but last time they came and spoke about depression, many of the women identified themselves as having this illness and so they were working on turning this into a support group. Today, the Australian psychologist (who is in Kisoro for 3 months) gave a talk about stress and techniques used to reduce stress. When asked about what makes these village women stressed they responded with answers like poverty, not having enough to feed my children, raising children when the husband is away most of the time, fighting in the home and so on. The Australian women talked about healthy and unhealthy coping mechanisms and walked the villagers through some breathing exercises. Immaculate also talked to the women about the importance of supporting one another and discussing problems with people outside of the home, and then she asked them what they want this support group to be called, answer: The Women Peace Keepers.

At the onset of the meeting there had been a bit of a discussion because one of the women of the community had attempted suicide last night. She was currently at the clinic across the street so someone went and got her for the meeting. I kept an eye on her the entire time. When others laughed and joked, she remained so serious. She stayed after so we could talk with her and I learned that she has four children. Her husband has work and money but uses it to pay for prostitutes, he even brings them to his home and forces his wife to sleep on the floor in the common room. She said her children often go to bed hungry and there is no money to pay for them to go to school. She took out loans to pay for land to farm but her husband never bought seeds and now she has no way to repay the debt. I asked how much she owes and it is around 300,000 of the Ugandan currency or roughly $100. Seeds would also cost around $100. My first instinct was to just offer to pay this but I realize this is not a sustainable solution and there are so many people here who need help. In fact, I learned from Immaculate today that suicide rates are at around 30%. I knew that alcohol consumption per capita is the second highest in the world here and that alcoholism is an epidemic, but I did not realize that suicide rates where so astronomically here too. This woman promised that she will come to the hospital for help and I truly hope that she shows up. I really do wish there was more that I or anyone could do to help but I really have no ideas (thoughts I have had: I heard of the Heiffer project, I wonder if they have something where people donate money for seeds and then get back a certain percentage at harvest time? If so, why is that not here? Or in farming communities like this could they have a collective fund so when some people have lots and others have a bad year there is a safety net?). I probably should have taken an ECON class or something…