This is Manuela.
She is Fount of Mercy's Community Health
Initiative Program Associate.
She also was one of our beautiful scarf models this year!
Manuela
is the newest member of Fount of Mercy’s (FOM) local staff. She completed her diploma in Social Work and
Social Development in January 2012, and came on staff part-time later that year.
We are happy to announce that, thanks to a grant we received this year, Manuela became full-time this year!
This work is
truly her passion. In her own words,
Manuela states, “I love my job so much, as part of my job is to develop people
in my community.”
So,
what does Manuela do with FOM? And, why
is it so important?
In
Uganda, women and young girls are often marginalized. Culturally and historically, women have been
treated as possessions; being valued as commodities for their fertility and
their usefulness in the home and garden.
As teenagers, they are often given for marriage to older men because the
family, who struggles in poverty, will receive a bride-price in return. As older women, they can be a part of a plural
marriage, in which a man takes many wives. However, he cannot provide for them
all, let alone all the children he creates with them. They suffer as much from poor self-esteem as
they do from physical need. As a result
of these [and many other] problems, a cycle is created.
A
family’s poverty leads to giving of teenaged wives, who have not finished high
school and don’t know basic information about their own menstruation,
reproduction, birth control, and/or disease such as HIV/AIDS. Combine this with the fact that, culturally,
it is inappropriate for a girl to talk to her own mother about these
topics. It would be ideal if a girl
confided in an aunt or teacher.
Unfortunately, more often than not, a girl will turn to her peers whose
knowledge base is equally lacking. Many will enter either a formal marriage or
an informal sexual relationship without the knowledge they need to protect
themselves and prevent situations that will escalate the hardships in their
lives. These include unplanned pregnancies, plural
marriages, abandonment, disease, abuse, etc. As a result, a cycle is created in
which misinformed young girls grow up into misinformed women who give birth to a new generation of women who lack that same information.
Manuela
combats this problem by hosting what FOM refers to as “Girls Camps” for groups of adolescent girls. She goes into a community and mobilizes the
local female youth by using the local schools and community leaders. Then, they meet with Manuela and she gives
them life-saving information. The curriculum used in FOM Girls Camps is
designed to combat the dangerous cycle of misinformation concerning women's
bodies in Uganda. These myths can lead
to unplanned pregnancies and HIV infection. The goals of the classes are to
replace myths with facts, and to create a generation of women who educate and
empower each other.
Manuela has also developed a Boys Camp to be taught alongside the Girls Camps. We hope to implement this course in 2014. Women’s quality of life in Uganda is often dependent
on how the men in their lives treat them. If boys are taught to respect and value
the girls in their life, then later they will become men who value and respect
the women in their lives.
In
order to affect more and more girls and boys, Manuela also teaches what FOM
calls a “Life Skills Course” to
adults who work with youth. The adults can then teach the course in their own communities. The
curriculum she uses is based on seven principles of behavior change developed
by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
The belief is that once individual motivation is in place, then skills
can be implemented and information given to create a positive life change in
youth. These positive life changes
include effective communication, decision-making, thinking, managing emotions,
assertiveness, self-esteem building, resisting peer pressure, and relationship
skills. This course goes hand-in-hand
with the Girls Camps, as once a youth possesses these life skills, they can
take the information from the Girls Camps and have the confidence and tools to
apply it in their own lives. The hope is
that women who understand their bodies, their health, their relationships and
their lives as a whole will be able to make decisions for themselves that are
healthy and positive.
Manuela
is the perfect liaison for this work.
She not only has the educational background, but the heart and the
understanding of what it is like to be a youth and a woman in Uganda. She has also overcome the hardship of growing
up without her parents. As many Ugandan
children do, Manuela lived with relatives.
This can often be a hard situation, as many times these “extra” children
are last on the extremely long list of priorities, so they don’t receive school
fees, adequate medical care, clothing, or even food. Manuela has worked hard to earn her diploma and
hopes that her job with FOM can last for a long time and she can pursue
more schooling.
We hope so too!
