Productive Reporting Day (Woot)

Hello, how are you? Today was a very productive reporting day.  I got a great interview after camping out for a bit at the World Bank-funded Butabika Hospital in Kampala, which will be perfect for some stories on mental health in Uganda that I have been working on.  I interviewed a 13-year-old girl and her mother from Bunia, DR Congo, who fled the country seven years ago.  The young woman, her name is Sarah, had suppressed her memories of the war for years, but the memories came flooding back when she was kidnapped at a market in Kawempe last month, and molested.  Thankfully, she managed to escape, but was held in captivity for a day without food, and defiled.  Since then, all of the traumatic memories of her father and brother’s deaths by rebels in the eastern Congo have overwhelmed her.  About three times a day, she said she has flashbacks of her father’s day, and imagines that men with machetes will either attack her or the people around her.  At night, she suffers from terrible nightmares.  With terrible timing, UNHCR announced that they were cutting off support to her mother (they had been covering her rent in Kampala, where her mom worked as a washwoman), and she would have to resettle to a refugee camp for Congolese.  They were given two choices of camps that offer services for people living with HIV.  At this point, Sarah discovered that her mother had gotten infected when she had been raped by rebels in 2002 (they then fled to Uganda)– the mother hadn’t felt strong enough to tell her that she was positive.  When she found out, Sarah went completely mute, and her mother took her to Butabika for treatment for PTSD.