Huts for Peace: How homeless, ousted women in Uganda rebuilt their lives | Agnes Igoye | Big Think

Huts for Peace: How homeless, ousted women in Uganda rebuilt their lives

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Agnes Igoye works as Uganda’s Deputy National Coordinator for Prevention of Trafficking in Persons. She also initiated the Huts for Peace program with the Clinton Global Initiative. Here, Igoye tells us about the start of the idea: visiting a community in Uganda where 15 women had become homeless because of brutal acts of war in the region. She helped the women get organized and build huts on church land, turning their lives around in the course of just a couple of weekends. Through the Clinton Global Initiative University, Igoye is committed to building care centers for survivors of human trafficking and training law enforcement to better recognize and combat the illegal activity.

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AGNES IGOYE:

Agnes Igoye is committed to establish a rehabilitation center for victims of human trafficking in Uganda. In partnership with the International Organization for migration, Agnes will create a center for 20 women and girls that will provide schooling and vocational training for survivors, and will also train over 1,000 law enforcement officers on how to recognize and combat human trafficking. Agnes aims to produce a documentary about human trafficking in Uganda to be distributed internationally, and hopes to expand her program to serve more women.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Agnes Igoye: One thing about making commitments of

action is, I keep telling people: don’t make it cast in stone.

When you go to the field keep asking questions. And I remember I was responding to the children who were abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army. I was in northern Uganda and then I just kept asking questions.

Then I asked, “What happened to the women who went through the war?” Because there was a lot of, you know, rape, as a weapon of war.

And the local concert chairman told me okay, there are 15 women. So I took a bus to meet these 15 women because some of them were raped, homeless.

So I just went to meet with them and I just started asking questions.

First of all I said you are fifteen people, you have one man in the group. How is that? And they told me that this man knows how to read and write, so that’s why they have him in the group. Because when they talk about their issues and all that there’s somebody who can read and write.

So for me, that was already communication—that the women do not know how to read and write.

So I thanked the gentleman for being part of the team and I asked them which villages they come from. That’s when I started hearing stories of homelessness. One woman told me how her husband was abducted and then the rebels used him to come and kill his own people. So in retaliation, his people sent her away with her six daughters.

So you can imagine, every night they have to look for where to sleep, to stay. And woman after woman told me how they are homeless. So then I asked them a question: what does it take to have a house? Because those are, you know, grass thatched houses.

And then they started to tell me it takes grass, it takes water, it takes this.

I’m like, where can we get those things? And then they started to tell me—so it’s them actually getting their own ideas.

Then I told them, what do we require that needs money? So it came to nails, you know, things like wood to make the doors and stuff like that.

But most of the things, the materials would come from their own communities. And for me I remember that day I said okay, I’ll leave money for two huts—because those are the houses.

And I say okay, in which order are we going to get this housing?

So they also knew which woman was more desperate. “Okay, this one who has more children and this one doesn’t have anything.”

So they made their own decisions. And then we started dividing roles:

“Okay, this is the money I have, so who will keep this money?” So we already got an accountant. We had somebody in charge of water. We had somebody in charge of cooking food while the others are building. And the next weekend —because it was urgent—it dawned on us that some of the women did not have land. And we said okay, who can we ask for land? Who has land in this village? And they said oh, there’s a church.

So we went to see the head of the church. We said okay, we need land.

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