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Abandoned by parents, Aluka struggles to raise six siblings
Mary Aluka sorts vegetables before moving around to look for customers at her home in Banda, Kampala, on June 9. PHOTO | KELVIN ATUHAIRE
What you need to know:
- Background. I was staying with my step dad and when he died, the situation with my step mum became unbearable. She later left with her two children. I was left to take care of my mother’s five children,” Aluka reveals.
Ms Mary Aluka would be a first year student at the university pursuing her dream course in hospitality and hotel management.
But on Heroes Day last week, she was vending vegetables in the corridors of affluent homesteads in Bukoto and Ntinda, two Kampala suburbs, with a cannula in her left hand. She has been vending vegetables for about two years.
“I am trying to raise money that can help take me back to school. Even when I give birth, children will not limit me from going back to school. It is only money limiting me now,” Ms Aluka says.
What strikes one is her clarity and fluency in English language, something associated with the educated elite class in Uganda. Hers is a long story she tells Daily Monitor.
After public transport resumed on June 4, fares were increased to almost double for most routes in Kampala due to social distancing requirements. Passenger service vehicles carry half capacity to avoid congestion and spread of coronavirus. Ms Aluka can no longer afford taxis. The transport would reduce her meagre profit margin of between Shs7,000 and Shs10, 000.
At about 3pm, she wearily drags her tired feet towards the home of her mother-in-law, Ms Fina Pirilit, in Banda, a Kampala suburb. Ms Pirilit is also a vegetable vendor.
As she sorts vegetables for sale at the soil smeared verandah, she looks frail and dehydrated. Not only is malaria taking a toll on her but also life itself more than young woman of 23 years can handle.
In the neighborhood, children cheerfully play with dogs. Men and women surround malwa pots, sucking through long tiny wooden strews.
What strikes you when you enter Aluka’s home is the difference in language dialects. Everyone seems to speak Alur but she speaks fluent English and Luganda. The others do not to know Ateso, her mother tongue.
Ms Aluka is a girlfriend to Mr Ronnie Jawiambe, 23, who also vends vegetables in Kampala suburbs of Kireka, Ntinda, Nakawa and Bukoto to earn a living.
Their home
Ms Aluka enters Ms Pirilit’s house and prepares a seat. Two beds line the floor at the rectangle corners adjacent to each other with a Johnson seat in the middle of the room. A few jerricans and cooking utensils welcome one into the single room with a brown wooden door and window. The brown transparent curtain can hardly separate the seating space from the beddings.
Ms Aluka eloped with Mr Jawiambe in 2018 but dreams of continuing with her studies draw a darker cloud than her imaginations.
“I studied from Hillstone Primary School in Mbuya, then went to Kumi Comprehensive Secondary School up to Senior Four. I was staying with my step dad and when he died, the situation with my step mum became unbearable. She later left with her two children. I was left to take care of my mother’s five children,” she reveals.
Ms Aluka was the only child from her mother’s first marriage.
“I was around 12 years old when she remarried. She was in the village (Kumi) and the husband was working in Kampala as a security guard. He had around four wives. She could not get any assistance from him. She left. She had five children with him. I was still in Primary Six.
The situation became worse. I had started menstruating but could not afford pads, even school requirements,” she recalls.
A 2018 Uganda Bureau of Statistics report shows that Uganda had 1,875,762 children who had dropped out of school and 71,575 who lived in child-headed families.
Ms Aluka and her six siblings contribute to these disturbing statistics. The children endured. Their mother had gone without saying goodbye.
“I would forgive her if she came back. I do not know where she is but I would treat her like the prodigal son in the Bible,” she says.
Ms Aluka does not understand why her mother would leave them in a family where she was looked at as an outsider.
Family torture
“The paternal family to my step dad would every time say, ‘you are here eating our food yet you are not our biological child,’” she recalls.
Ms Aluka would be insulted and accused of the slightest error on a daily basis. This traumatised her. Her siblings lacked food and other basic needs. She had to take over the responsibility of parenting at the age of 14. Looking for vegetables to sell or cook for her siblings became part of her life.
Fortunately, her biological father picked her up and rescued her from the huge responsibilities. But this was like falling from the frying pan into fire.
A new step mother with new ways of dealing with a minor and meaner ways of taking care of a step daughter.
Being a businessman, her father could afford to pay her school fees up to Senior Four. But before she could join Advanced Level, his business hit a snag. Ms Aluka only knew him as a businessman without details of what he dealt in.
She ran to start a new life in Kampala, first staying with friends then later renting her own single room in Kireka.
She had to reunite with her other siblings who were still in the home of her stepfather.
Their suffering caused her so much pain. Ms Aluka called two of her other followers, now aged 18 and 20, to live with her. The three stated their journey to changing their lives.
The National Population and Housing Census, 2014, indicates that more than 13 million children in Uganda live under unbearable conditions, with 28,800 in child-headed families.
The children face severe financial constraints that often force them into early marriage, substance abuse, transactional sex or criminality.
Work struggles
Ms Aluka worked in a restaurant in Kireka in 2017 where she was paid Shs3,000 per day. After eight months, she quit the job since she could not sustain herself and the siblings on the earning. All her siblings had dropped out of school during their primary education.
The burden for Ms Aluka was huge to take care of her siblings coupled with the pressure to provide food and pay rent was high. Education was out of their life equation then.
Her younger sister, now 18, decided to get married despite her pleas to wait till she is mature. Her brother decided to stay in Bukasa with his Indian boss who he runs errands for.
Last year, Ms Aluka started dating Mr.Jawiambe. The two stay together but Ms Aluka says their marriage cannot stop her from going back to school and having her dream career.
“I started vending vegetables with Shs7,000. I buy from Nakawa then sell with a profit of Shs5,000, sometimes Shs7,000. I do not have a stall where to sell. I walk looking for buyers.
But my goal is to save at least Shs5,000 per day which is not easy because when I fall sick like now, I cannot walk to sell enough to raise for my saving.”
She adds: “I want to try my level best so that when I make 30 years, I have a stable business and also employing other people when I am no longer walking with these vegetables.”
Despite everything, Ms Aluka is hopeful that she will one day become a great business person. Her aspiration is to inspire other girls who dropped out of school not to give up in self-pity but work hard through whatever available decent means to have a better future.
Statistics
A 2018 Uganda Bureau of Statistics report shows that Uganda had 1,875,762 children who had dropped out of school and 71,575 who lived in child-headed families.
According to a UNICEF, 2015 Situation Analysis of Children in Uganda report, while Uganda has made important strides in extending primary schooling since Universal Primary Education was introduced in 1997, dropout rates remain high. A 2018 Uganda National Bureau of Statistics report shows that 41,848 children in Kampala were out of school while 3,723 were living in child-headed families.
