Support for Vulnerable Women
& Their Families
When women in poverty need to provide for themselves and their children, they cannot look beyond their daily struggle for survival. They are always in a state of emergency. When their vital needs are met and their children are clothed and fed, women receive more than physical support; they receive a psychological and emotional lift. They feel that someone cares about them and has their family's back. Their new-found stability both enables and empowers them to focus on long-term sustainability. Many women who have received basic aid support from ULA have moved on to participate in our empowerment workshops, where they've received training in income-generating activities and learned sustainable means to support their family.
We at ULA provide women the basic items they need for their daily survival -- food, clothes, soap, etc. We have also provided housing for 46 HIV women victims and their families in rural Western Uganda. Below, Komugisha Jolly, a refugee from Rwanda, shares how ULA's emergency aid has offered her hope and a path towards thriving.
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Komugisha Jolly
"My name is Komugisha Jolly, a refugee from Rwanda. I lost all my relatives to genocide which happened in Rwanda in 1994. I came to Uganda when I was 16 years old. The people that helped me to enter Uganda changed my name from Kinyarwanda to a Ugandan Runyankole language name, Komugisha, for security reasons. I am now 40 years old. After staying in the refugee camp for many years, I was given a letter to allow me to stay near, but outside the camp in Omutyaza, where I work and earn a living.
I have five children and two of them are twins, all of them were not going to school until ULA found me and started paying for one of them. ULA has given me clothes, soap and paid my children’s medical bills, and provided counseling for us. Yes, I am still unsettled but I feel that ULA is giving the best gift of education to my child and I call ULA team my relatives. After 24 years I have spent in Uganda as a refugee, I found a group of people to call my friends, my relatives, people that love me and my children regardless of the situation in which I am."
Invitation to Transform a Life
Kanslime Alice's Story
Kansiime Alice is a Ugandan widow, aged thirty-four and HIV positive. She is raising four children, now orphaned by the father. They live in Bukanga in Isigiro Town council, Western Uganda. Before her husband died of HIV/AIDS, he sold off the piece of land the family lived on, that he had inherited from his father.
The family now live on a piece of land which Alice purchased for herself using the money she earned by laboring in other people’s homes. The house they live in is a dilapidated old house that was on the land. They do not have a pit latrine. With a donation of $1,800 ULA can build on her piece of land a decent small cement house with an outhouse "that would last 30 years." She could live there and raise her children.
