These are people working out in the tea fields.
This is a boda-boda, which is a frequent means of transportation. I'm assuming it's safe because it looks like a motorcycle and my parents bought one of those for my brothers.
These are some children in the community going to the well to get clean water.
Today, I had the opportunity to go on a field trip to a rural village with one of the Save the Mothers classes. We went to a clinic in a rural village and we spoke with some of the people in the village. This is the fourth time the class has been there, so they have been able to establish some relationships with the people there. The purpose of this visit was to address the issues that are causing unsafe motherhood and how the group could help solve these problems.
I sat in with a group and had one of the ladies interpret the Lugandan for me. We were discussing the issue of family planning so that a husband and wife would sit down and decide how many children they wanted to have so that they would be in agreement. The women of the village said that they could try and sometimes they decide that they would want to have 6 children but then the man decides that he wants to have more children so he finds another woman. It is also difficult to sit down with a man and woman for family planning because if you told a man to bring his wife, he has a number of women that he could bring!
Many of us wonder why people have so many children because if you cannot support more than 2 children, you only have 2 children. But here in Africa it is status to have children and if women do not have children, the men will leave them. Women and children do not have rights, so if a woman and her baby dies in childbirth, the man just goes out and marries another woman.
Women need men, in this culture, because since the women marries the man, the man ‘owns’ her and everything she has. If the woman buys some chickens and raises them, the man can just take them once they are full grown, go to the market, and take all the profits for them. The man doesn’t want the woman to have access to any money or own any nice clothes because otherwise other men will want to have children with her as well. So, they ensure that their wife looks as poor and haggard as possible.
There are so many issues that I would never have even thought would have been problems because we live in such different cultures.
I just wanted to put up some pictures and inform you of some fun adventures that I have experienced on my trip. Anyone interested in the organization that I working through can look up http://www.savethemothers.org/ I am keeping occupied with running the classes for Save the Mothers right now but since the program is a modular program and the modules are 3 weeks each, I will have time to help out at the orphanage nearby.
These are homes with stacks of bricks in front. Sometimes you see a field of people making bricks and there are piles of these bricks with leaves draped over them.
