July 27, 2006
I spent my last full week in Gulu interviewing child mothers–girls who were abducted by the LRA and were impregnated through rape. Nearly all of them have been rejected by their communities and their children are called “killers” because they were born to commanders and are thought to carry that evil spirit in them. Stigmatized and segregated the girls live a life of a lone-dweller, a lost soul riding the edge of depression and demand with their only saving grace being the acceptance of other child mothers. I still have to write up some of their stories and post what I learned. But here’s something I wrote while I was there.
Women work the land, babies on their hips or tied to their backs in colors grown dull by sun.
Somehow they still manage to wield a machete in their palms as they dig out roots or carve a line for planting. As is the nature of most societies women are the movers and the shakers, the catalyst sparking movement forward.
Perhaps it is our nature—to inspire, to drive and to get less sleep than the rest of the population. Not that I fit into that category, but I remember my mother reading us to sleep at night and waking early to pack my dad’s lunch in his blue Coleman. Somehow she managed to do it all—even come home and cook dinner after a full day’s work, sit down after us, and be up before us washing the dishes before we could take our last swallow. I still don’t know how she eats that fast.
Here they are always in fields of maize or fields of tea, a shade of green brighter than fresh cut grass.
Once I saw one managing to hold her baby while hacking into a tree stump. “Where are all the men?”
Not to get all feminist, ahem, but I will. When you ask them they simply say they are back at the camp or in the village. Hmm…doing what I wonder. Drinking is my guess. Not just my guess, but a known fact.
Here in Uganda the men drink their dignity away since it has already been stolen from them. Unable to provide for their families in the way their warrior, farmer culture has always done, they resort to forgetting. I know quite a few good men, and realize I am one of the lucky ones, but where are the few good men in Uganda? Farther and farther apart. Who is teaching them it isn’t ok?
Thankfully, my life has been filled with amazing men and I think it was a God-thing so I could do the kind of work I do without being bitter towards their entire gender. To see women who have been raped, or smacked across the mouth, or left to fend for themselves with two children, one still nursing, while he goes off and sleeps with someone else and be able to look them in the eyes and say “You don’t deserve this” and “God has someone better for you,” and mean it. It takes having some kind of hope.
Hope that springs from the knowledge of someone different. Isn’t that what hope is after all? The possibility.
I am as pro-woman as it gets without wearing an “I hate men” T-shirt and not shaving my legs. Sorry, that was stereotypical.
But I’m seeing that if we only empower women then what happens when they get liberated and go home and get beaten for their new-found freedom?
What happens when we spend all this time teaching her how to run her own business and he comes and takes the money? Of course, we need to empower women, but we have to take it a step further or we’re only kidding ourselves. In their culture, they rely upon men to provide. Like I did with my sweet friend Jennifer in Lira, you can give her beans and rice but she’ll somehow end up cooking for him when he finally comes home.
Liberation is a mentality that takes a long time.
And aloneness is not something every woman wants to sign up for, or can sign up for in her culture. More than ever we need male role models into today’s age. Not that I’m into the whole Promise Keepers thing, but they got one thing right—we need men to stand in the gap, because there is a gap and it is rapidly increasing. We need women too, but for some reason, in this kind of field, they are easier to come by. Because in the end, women can be free, but we exist for relationship and will always long for it. We can leave them, especially the bad ones, but we don’t always want to. We just want them to change. And we think we can change them. Right.
I want to pour my life into girls and women. I want to see them become. I love their strength. I love their ability to overcome. But we are not on this earth by ourselves and as much as we might hate it sometimes, we love ‘em.
There’s this guy Jackson Katz I heard about in Colorado when I was doing Domestic Violence training who runs workshops for men and has a film called Tough Guise all about dismantling the idea that our society has drilled into men that they have to be like Rambo or never cry.
He is one of the few I can think of who are doing work towards men directed at ending violence against women. And I think it’s brilliant. We need more like him.
It begins here with me, a movement, a tiny revolution where instead of picking up my sword, I lay it down.
Instead of trying to change the world on my own, I recognize my need for help. It’s not a surrender, it’s more like a truce.
