It’s Saturday, 17th August, 2019. We are in the women’s ward in St. Mary’s Lacor Hospital where Alice Otuwa, a 31 year old Madi girl from Pagirinya is admitted for the weekend. Alice is awaiting Monday, when the Doctors here will give her word on her situation after proper medical examination. Under Alice’s bed is a small old bucket that she uses as a toilet for all her short calls.
This has been her reality for the past fifteen years. Her body can neither hold waste nor life, for in 2018, she miscarried at five months of carrying and suffered ridicule from her co-wives which was magnified by the fact that she is the youngest of her husband’s wives. She has been married to him since 2017.
Alice’s woes commenced in 2006 after she was abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), together with eight other teenage girls from their village in Pagirinya, in the middle of the night. Alice and the other girls were sexually abused and raped by the soldiers who were way bigger, both in size and age.
Fortunate for Alice, the Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF) attacked the rebels’ convoy and amidst the mayhem, she managed to flee, but found her-self miles away from home. A number of weeks later, it dawned on her that she was pregnant.
A pregnancy of trauma coupled with shame, forced Alice into hiding and thus did not seek any medical help due to fear of stigmatization in a foreign society. Nine months down the road, her body was sick and weakly, her urine was black and smelly, her stool was mixed with puss and the pain in her stomach was deadening. Against all odds, she had to be taken to hospital where it was discovered that the baby had been dead in the womb for two weeks now.
The nurses induced labour for Alice and three days later, the baby came out but without the body skin. The skin had rotted and peeled off as the baby had been dead for long. Pieces of the baby’s body skin remained in Alice’s womb.
Migration for Alice Otuwa has been a reality of unhealed mental, emotional. biological and physical damage. But not all hope is lost, especially after her recent encounter with Refugee Law Project in 2013 which has seen her through multiple surgeries up until this point at Lacor Hospital where she hopes to finally get a final word on her health condition.
