Harriet – one amazing lady

I’ve done several blogs over the past couple of years about various insights and experiences of the Acholi Quarters, and somewhere within most of them, I’ll have mentioned Harriet.

But it’s occurred to me that I’ve never actually blogged properly about Harriet herself; and as we approach the International Women’s Day, it seems appropriate timing to put that right.

Harriet, like so many others living in Acholi Quarters in Kampala, fled from the north when she was just a young teenager. The Lords Resistance Army were abducting teenagers to be used as child soldiers, or to become child ‘wives’ to the adult soldiers, and it thus wasn’t safe for the likes of Harriet to stay in the area. So she left, with her family, and they eventually made it to Acholi Quarters, 340km to the south, in Kampala.

She has lived there ever since, and for most of her time she earned little bits of money breaking up rocks in the quarry.  The amount people tend to earn there is about 1000 shillings, or 25p per day, so you can imagine the poor conditions that she and her family have had to endure.

For many people, just getting through each day is as much as they can manage – life is about surviving, and there is no forward planning or thinking beyond where the next meal will come from.

But Harriet isn’t like that. She and some friends learnt about making paper beads and associated jewelry items, and they set up a co-operative to work together in making and selling their products. Initially they used to go to markets to sell their products, with just small amounts being sold via John Njendahayo and the various teams that he hosts through CRED, Link and beyond. But over the years the international teams market has grown and now the ladies sell almost exclusively to teams.

Harriet is the head of the co-operative, and it has been my privilege to watch her grow in confidence and organizational skills over the past few years. Whilst she may be head, she does not in any way use that position to her advantage, and all the ladies work together in many ways – supporting each other, looking out for each other’s children, taking turns at making the porridge when teams come and do the education sessions for the children…….

Everything is done selflessly, and Harriet is wonderful at looking for the best in people, and putting others before herself in many ways. She really is an inspirational lady.

One example of this is with a young lad who comes from a fairly dysfunctional family within Acholi Quarters, but who was having some much needed medical treatment that had been funded by an external donor. The first stage of the treatment involved taking the lad to the hospital in town for some tests. Harriet, not confident that the mum would manage to get there and back without money etc going astray, took a day out of her work to go with them and ensure that all the right questions were asked, the right paperwork picked up, and the right prescriptions collected.  Having returned to Acholi Quarters, Harriet has visited the family every day to make sure that the lad gets the right medicines at the right time, and she even takes him some food to make sure that they aren’t taken on an empty stomach.

At other times Harriet will be found taking school fees from the Acholi education fund to the local school to pay for one of the children to be able to go to school. This might be top-up fees, or the entire amount, but prior to taking the money to the school Harriet will have been working with the relevant families in a social-work type capacity, to ensure a degree of responsibility is placed on the family to play their part in supporting the child in school, and that they don’t just assume a culture of dependency and start frittering away any money earned on illegal alcohol etc.

Another thing Harriet does is to liaise with the ladies to sort out the bead orders, and source a range of items so that everyone gets a chance to sell some of their goods rather than just a few getting all the market; and then to distribute the money to those whose items have been sold – no small matter when we are talking of hundreds of thousands of shillings of goods being sold (£1 = 4,000 shillings).

There is so much more that Harriet gets up to in the background – quietly, humbly, and with a smile on her face and a laugh in her voice.  There is no pretentiousness; she lives in a single room, with her two children, and any other waifs and strays that are in need at the time. No running water, no electricity, no sanitation – Harriet might be head of the co-operative but she lives in simplicity along with the rest of the group, and she is the first to give rather than receive.

International Women’s Day is on March 8^th, which also happens to be the day that Harriet is due to give birth to her 3^rd child. The father of the child was killed by the police 6 months ago, due to a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and this baby is all Harriet will have left of the man that she loved.

Does that make her bitter? No. It doesn’t seem to have slowed her down either! To my mind Harriet epitomizes all that is best about humanity, and women, and I pray that she will know many blessings over the coming weeks and months, as she has been such an incredible blessing to so many.