by Alessandra Muglia – photographs by Stefano Schirato – video by Aldo Gianfrate
After a year and a half spent in the bush hostage of the rebels, Adelo was a ghost of herself. “I was 15 when they kidnapped me, but I already had two children, one just a month old. I left them to my mother. They forced me to kill and torture my people. They made me feel worse than them, a cursed one. They raped me, I was infected by HIV. I never thought I would survive all this. And let alone one day see our boys graduate and leave these huts to go to university ». It is almost noon, the sun is hot above the expanse of plates and red soil lying on the hill of Kireka, a suburb of Kampala.
Adelo smiles, Adelo who then became Ketty, Ketty Adong. “I changed my name when I escaped from the forest,” she says, sitting on a bench in her brick hut in the heart of the Acholi slum. A shanty town without running water, sewers and inhabited mostly by women of the Acholi race, the same as the rebels, the most massacred race during the civil war that for nearly twenty years has bathed in blood their lands: the insurgents kidnapped them to enlist them and make them their own women, the government crammed them into inhuman camps before destroying their villages in search of the militia. Women who arrived exhausted from the north, where the fighting raged, found refuge on this hill overlooking a huge stone quarry. Rose Busingye welcomed them.
Rose is a Ugandan nurse, who dispenses care and attention at her International Meeting Point, an NGO local partner of the AVSI Foundation. Magnetic gaze, she is venerated here like a lay mother Teresa: she is the person who has “liberated” these women from the weight of inhuman experiences, as they themselves sing in a kind of welcome show. Women who have seen hell and now put it on stage, dance on it, let themselves be carried away and dragged to the rhythm of drums and calabashes. An explosion of vitality and enthusiasm that you do not expect. “At first they wanted to let themselves die – says Rose in Italian (she studied in Varese) – they did not want to cure themselves, they sold the antiretrovirals we distributed”.
They could only break stones to survive: 50 kilos of gravel for the equivalent of 70 cents in euros. And a whole day breaking their backs is not always enough to take them home. A bestial effort for anyone, a massacre for these women positive to HIV or with already full-blown illness. But the Acholi slum today is also something else. Ketty, after having told us of when she was still Adelo, gets up, opens the door and proudly points out a big boy out there. Charles Carron meets us, jeans, T-shirt and deep black eyes. He is her eldest son, 18 years old and graduated in a very special high school: Ketty built it herself together with other Rose’s women.
“Here we felt looked after beyond our miseries and we were born again, we wanted the same for our boys,” says Doreen Angoon, 52 and 5 children, also from the North of the city of Gulu, and landed here after being kidnapped by Kony rebels. “In the other schools they insulted our children. Your mother has HIV” they mocked them, sometimes even the teachers. This is why we said to ourselves: “We must build our school and we succeeded ». In 2010, they began to create necklaces with recycled colored paper strips rolled up like beads and then waterproofed with enamel – they sold 48 thousand, mainly thanks to the Avsi network abroad. “With our gravel we made the floors, erected walls,” adds Angon with proud.
In 2012 the inauguration: the school is a modern mango-colored building on the other side of the hill, along Kireka road. State-of-the-art laboratories, spacious classrooms with nice wooden furniture, bathrooms with running water, reproductions of “The Sower at Sunset” and “First Steps” by Van Gogh and phrases like “teaching is the adult way of learning”.
The slum seems light years away. Many arrive after more than an hour walk and stay there until the evening to take advantage of the light that is scarce at home. Inside the school, 450 students, girls and boys together, 45 per class, a half compared to 90 of the national average. Seven years after its birth, it’s time for budgets. «Since 2014, 156 students have reached the high school degree, of these 78 are attending university – explains Matteo Severgnini, educational adviser -. The others could not enter it because they were could not afford to pay taxes.
"Even if they work in the quarry every weekend, as many students do barefoot, from elementary to high school, to be able to pay the contribution for the school material. The tuition fees are covered by Avsi for 352 slum students with distance support. On the contrary, 100 students coming from (relatively) well-off families, provide for themselves. The institute is also frequented by young people living outside the slums, and is now recognized as a school of excellence.
«This year we entered the top 100 of the best schools in Uganda – 76ths out of 1592 – based on the results obtained at the final exam. A great result: nobody expected it from an institution that welcomes children from the poorest areas of the city and where it is forbidden to beat in order to teach ». An innovative method compared to the others where the motto “spare the rod and spoil the child” is applied (if you do not use the wand you spoil the child). “So much appreciated by the pupils that 80% of the 78 slum university students study pedagogy because they want to teach,” says Severgnini. The revolution of education (and of a society) starts from here.