Friendship Village

Paul and I visited Friendship Village yesterday, the village that Bead for Life has built for some of its beaders. It's located on a lovely hillside a half-hour outside of Kampala. When it was begun about three years ago, women involved with BFL were given the option of building a house there with BFL's help. The village has since filled up with about 130 families, most of them headed by HIV-positive women. A number of the women are Acholi refugees who fled the violence of Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda and had been living in slums for years.

Although the houses might not look like much, they're a big step up from what the women had before. The second picture shows a typical house that many of the women used to live in: mud and stick construction in crowded conditions with poor sanitation (most of the women entering our program use latrines shared by ten or more families). The FV homes, built for about $2000, have two bedrooms and a sitting room. They're brick and mortar with a concrete floor, iron-sheeted roof, and a private latrine. The families have a yard around the house where they can grow vegetables or flowers, as well as a garden plot nearby. When they finish paying off their mortgage they will own the house free and clear.

Although it's a real boost in life for the women to have these homes, things aren't perfect. As is the case everywhere in the world, where you have people, you have conflict. The village is taking steps towards being self governing, but some of the women who have risen to leadership positions are interested in wielding power for their own advancement. Other women complain to BFL staff about this, but they won't speak up to the leaders for fear of the repercussions. The staff member who was giving us our tour yesterday told us that her vegetables had been stolen from her garden plot by women living in the village. I asked her what would happen if one woman saw another woman stealing from a garden, and she said, "Probably nothing, because both women would likely have stolen at one time or another." Some of the women are unmotivated to work because of years of depending on handouts from NGO's.

FV has problems with their water, which is typical everywhere we go. One of the village's two hand pumps is broken, and the water in the other one sometimes comes out rusty. Paul may not be able to do a lot for them, but he will look into options for getting the pump repaired and pass the information along.