Stella'nın Hayatında Bir Değişiklik Yapmak - Make a Change to Stella's Life

Make a Change to Stella's Life (1 haber 30 isim, 8 eşanlamlı kelime)

Observer Christmas appeal 2009: make a change to Stella's life Amelia Gentleman , The Observer This year we have teamed up with a small Ugandan NGO, the Mvule Trust, to provide educationbursariesto help young people, such as Stella, in the Teso region of north-east Uganda. Recipients will learn theskillstheir communities so badly need inagriculture,forestry,health, business and education.

When theinsurgencyin northern Uganda was at its most recent height, the doors of the Obalanga health centre, in thedistrictof Amuria, would be besieged by the sick and the dying from early morning. Stella found it almost impossible to attract the attention of the overworked nurses. "My baby is very sick," she would tell the other people in thequeue. "Let me go to the front." "Are we not also sick?"voicesfrom thecrowdwould reply, refusing to let her pass.

The nurses struggled to cope with thecrushof patients, made ill by the conditions at the nearby camp set up for villagers fleeing theviolencewreaked by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). There were very few drugs in the health centre, and whatever it was they prescribed for Stella's nine-month-old daughter did not work. After a month ofsickness,the baby, Susan, died one morning at Stella's thatched hut in the camp. "Nobody was there to help me. Nobody came to help until that baby died. "They did not intend to make my child die, but thepressureon the health centre was such that they could not help her," Stella says. "That experience will never go out of me."

Stella, now 21, tells this story not so much to evoke sympathy but to explain why she is determined to return to college and studynursing. She relates her experience as a way of illustrating how the inadequatetreatmentof her child at the hands of (possibly unqualified) nurses has fuelled anambitionto train herself and do better by her patients. If Stella wins one of thescholarshipbeing awarded by the Mvule Trust, thecharitythe Observer is supporting for its Christmas appeal this year, she plans to go to nursing college and hopes to specialise inmidwifery. Her story reflects thecatastrophesthat have blighted the lives of agenerationof children from thisstretchof north-eastern Uganda, but she tells her story in the manner of someone who seesdisasteras animpedimentthat can be overcome.

The difficulties began when the anti-government LRA came to the Teso region in 2003, killing farmers, abducting schoolchildren and spreading fear. Stella fled with her parents, her two younger sisters and three younger brothers to the camp in Obalanga. During the day her father would return to the area to gather food in the family's fields. "We said, 'Please, papa, don't go'. He said, 'But there's nothing to eat'," she remembers. It was not long before he was shot and killed by the fighters. Her father's death was disastrous. "Feeding really changed when daddy was no longer there. We used to have breakfast, lunch and supper. When he died there was only one meal," Stella says. "From the time that the old man died, I was wondering how will these kids be brought up," she says, nodding towards her youngersiblings. "How will I continue my education? How will our life end?"

If the work of the LRA attracted international attention (andconflictsin this part of conflict-ravaged East Africa rarely grab the front page), it was because of the flamboyant nature of its leader, Joseph Kony, the kidnapping of children for his army and his rebels'reputationfor extremebrutality. Less attention was paid to the humanitarian crisis that unfolded in the wake of the insurgency, with millions pushed into refugee camps.

In 2003 Jan Egeland, head of disasterreliefat the UN, described the fallout from the fighting as the world's biggest neglected humanitarian crisis. The conditions in the camps were bleak and the physicalupheavalof such a large section of society causedripplesof chaos and family breakdown.