At 16, Mary encourages older girls to return to school after pregnancy
With UNICEF support, TMF launched a campaign in July 2022 to get teen mothers back to school
She has never gotten pregnant and doesn’t intend to before finishing her formal education, which will be ten years in the future. But 16-year-old Mary Laido spends most her time sensitizing other adolescents, many of them older than herself to return to school after getting pregnant and giving birth.
Mary sat her Primary Leaving Exams at Kakamar Primary School in Uganda’s northeastern-most district of Kaabong in 2022, having lost two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But having determinedly kept herself safe during that difficult time, she has since dedicated her time and energy to rescuing her fellow adolescents who conceived and became mothers, persuading and helping them to return to school.
It is a daunting task. Working under the Trailblazers Mentoring Foundation (TMF) which is supported by UNICEF with funding from Irish Aid, Mary is in a team of seven peer advocates who have registered 120 affected girls. Personally, she has handled ten girls, five of whom had already given birth and five who were pregnant. So far, three mothers and three expectant ones have already accepted to go back to school. The remaining four like the idea but still face stiff challenges, like uncooperative families who have already accepted and “eaten’ the bride price paid by the perpetrators who made them pregnant.
The TMF programme manager for Kaabong and Karenga districts, Monica Charick, puts the task facing Mary and other peer advocates in perspective. Monica says that though TMF had been operating since 2013 and was getting on top of adolescent issues in the region, COVID-19 simply reversed the gains. In Kaabong District alone, 2,022 adolescents became mothers in one year from mid-2020 to mid-2021.
Supported by UNICEF with Irish Aid funding, on 20 July 2022, TMF launched a fresh campaign and besides the young peer advocates, secondary audiences were also trained including district Chief Administrative Officers and their deputies, divisional police commanders, probation officers, community development officers, sub-county and parish chiefs, Grade I magistrates, and of critical importance, champion parents who are both inspirational figures and also a backup force for the young peer advocates.
Sixty-four-year-old John Lokwee for example, is a retired teacher whose seven children who are working in different parts of the country all studied up to university. And while 40-year old Maria Itukei never went to school herself, she is a change agent in the community and a promoter of adolescent health who teaches girls how to make reusable menstrual pads and general life skills.
“I counsel boys not to laugh at girls in their periods, discourage all teens from taking alcohol and encourage all to work hard in school so as not to regret in future by pointing at their successful peers and telling people how they were with them in primary school,” says Maria.
With local leaders and officials sensitized, favourable pro-adolescent policies are implemented in the district and at Mary’s Kakamar Primary School, the head teacher Dorothy Hardline Adongo, this year re-admitted seven child mothers. She says she is looking forward to elimination of pregnancies in her school soon, once the promised UNICEF water project that will stop the children’s collecting water from outside the compound where they get molested is realized.
Mary’s ‘converted’ mothers are also already talking into returning to school. These ‘secondary’ peer advocates include 23-year-old Akidi Mary, a mother of a 3-year-old boy who is back to Pope John Paul Secondary School where she has finished Senior 3, Joyce Namongo, 17, who was married for several months but was persuaded to walk out and return to school before, and luckily hadn’t yet conceived, 19, a mother of a 2-month-old girl who is back to P7.
The team also has a boy, Maxben Lochu, 16, who is in Primary 7 and has convinced three girls and two boys to return to school.
But in many cases, returning to school is just the start of another battle, for in Karamoja, money for school fees is hard to come by, and it certainly won’t be from angry parents. As Programme Manager Monica Charick observes, some mothers do not have that strong an attachment to their daughters and some actively take part in “selling them off” to perpetrators for money to alleviate hunger in the family.
Besides, many girls are already orphans anyway. One of Mary’s current mentees is three years her senior, orphaned 19-year-old Martina Ilukal is four months pregnant, and remembers exactly the hour when she conceived on August 9th, for it was the first and last time she had sex with a local musician who had claimed he would marry her. She had just been expelled for school fees from Kaabong SSS where she was in Senior One.
Abandoned by the brief lover and with no likely sympathizers in her pregnant state, Martina resorted to sell local brew in Kaabong market, where Mary spotted her. The two have got so close that Mary has pledged to share with Martina a small plot she has in her grandmother’s piece of land by a seasonal river where they can grow vegetables for sale. While Martina’s meagre earnings from selling brew are strictly being in a savings box in preparation for maintaining the baby that is due in five months, she hopes to use whatever she may earn in vegetable growing for her school fees when she returns to school after delivery.
It all sounds desperate, but she has no option, and the hope peer advocate Mary has given her is what drives her into what looks like a mission impossible.
