Medical misery of Kitgum women
![Existence: life for women is tough in IDP camps [Photo: Yemi Adedeji/CMS]](images/uganda_women_050806_152px.jpg)
Tortured existence: life for women is tough in
IDP camps.
(Photo: Yemi Adedeji
/CMS)
Nearly 70 per cent of women displaced by war in northern Uganda suffer at least one gynaecological problem, says a new report.
A medical project in Kitgum District by the women’s NGO Isis-WICCE discovered shocking levels of gynaecological conditions, which had mostly been caused by sexual abuse.
Eighty-five per cent of those who had such conditions said that they had experienced some form of sexual abuse.
The report throws new light on the misery of the 1.8 million people living in displacement camps as a result of the 20-year war with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
Problems usually remain untreated as access to health care is so poor. The nearest specialist gynaecological unit is at Gulu Hospital, more than 50 miles away along one of the most dangerous roads in the country.
Untreated sexually transmitted infections are blamed for increased levels of infertility. Women are left debilitated and often abandoned by their husbands because of the stigma of such conditions.
Rape, sexual slavery and forced marriages have become commonplace features of the behaviour of the LRA. Among the tens of thousands of LRA abductees, many of them children, young girls have been taken and forced to become wives of rebel commanders.
In addition to sexual abuse as a tactic of war, life in internally displaced people’s (IDP) camps often causes traditional morals to break down. Men have no work and people live at close quarters, making casual sex and abusive relationships more common.
At the launch of the Isis-WICCE report Dr Musisi Seggane, Head of the Department of Psychiatry at Makerere University, explained. “Life in the IDP camps is difficult and breaks up the family structure and erodes respected traditional modes of existence. There is always deculturalisation, dehumanisation and demoralisation.”
CMS Africa Editor Julia Katorobo has made visits to four towns in northern Uganda, as well as displaced people’s camps. The mental images that remain with her are disturbing, she says, the suffering is next to impossible to express to someone who hasn’t seen it personally: “It is numbing.”
“I remember a girl with an amputated leg, another one holding a baby she conceived in captivity, but, where her mouth used to be, she had just a pink slit, and her ears were missing.
“I remember the little boys holding slingshots who were excitedly pointing to the top of a towering eucalyptus tree. They asked one of the clergymen showing us around to help them shoot at the crows so they could have something to eat.”
The gynaecological problems highlighted by the report are common throughout the country, says CMS mission partner Adrian Shutt, a surgeon who specialises in vesicovaginal fistula operations at Kisiizi Hospital in south-west Uganda.
The problems in the IDP camps, compounded by the extreme poverty and total lack of services, may be only a small indication of the future, says Adrian, who also leads surgical camps at Gahini in Rwanda.
“We are still seeing survivors of the Rwandan genocide coming for treatment now,” he says. A bad delivery of a child can result in an abnormal connection between vagina and bladder, resulting in constantly leaking urine.
Adrian’s wife Jane says, “Some girls were as young as 10 or 11 when they were raped during the genocide and may have been leaking for 10 years when they come for treatment.”
Adrian fears similar problems will come to light in Southern Sudan as the legacy of another country’s health care provision destroyed by war becomes apparent.
Meanwhile, hopes of an end to the war in northern Uganda once again receded as LRA leader Joseph Kony withdrew from peace talks being mediated by the government of southern Sudan.