Fellow Rosebell Kagumire offers a comment for “A Day Without Dignity”
Saundra over at Good Intentions Are Not Enough is organizing “A Day Without Dignity” as a counter campaign to TOMS Shoes’ annual advertisement (awareness raising activity) called A Day Without Shoes. She has asked aid workers, the diaspora, and people from areas that receive shoe drops and other forms of charity to speak up in blogs, on twitter, or at school.
Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan multimedia journalist working on peace and conflict issues [read more about her here], offers the following thoughts. Her comment below is based on an article she recently published titled “Delivering with barely anything; a story of a Ugandan mother” where she describes the conditions of a woman giving birth at the Buyinja Health Center IV. Read the article first here.
Baby Scovia was born in a health center in eastern Uganda, lucky for her there were two nurses, one to deliver her another to hold her sister who’s barely 2 yrs. The mother dropped out of school in primary seven and got pregnant and the man ran away when she was pregnant. She got married to Baby Scovia’s father. The day she delivered she had only the clothes she came wearing and nothing for the baby or for her to change into after delivery. There was a heavy shower that evening. Baby Scovia is likely not going to go to school because her father only cleans bikes for a living. Her mother has never worked at all. And maybe she will be married by the age of 18. I think there are ways one can secure a better future for baby Scovia. I could only leave a few dollars behind which won’t make even a month’s difference. The last worry for a Scovia would be shoes. Myself I didn’t wear shoes to school. I only had them for church on Sunday and social gatherings and didn’t see the lack of shoes as a major hurdle. So this ignorance of people who think their needs are other peoples’ needs is simply unacceptable. Also, the economic empowerment of those women who haven’t attained much education is key. These children and women don’t need anyone’s shoes. They need to be empowered to buy their own things which fit their needs.