At seventeen years of age, she leaves her parents’ home, running after a good for nothing contract company worker who earns loose change and can hardly write his own name, a drunkard who spends his pathetic salary on alcohol.
Our girl, though, patiently and happily stands by her man and lives at his house with no food and no proper clothes. She still tries her best to impress this man who has done nothing but ruin her life from the word go!
It evades our girl that, at her age, she has her whole life ahead of her and can achieve great things and pick a decent husband for her kids.
Ambition died before our girl became a woman.
She left her family thinking she was fleeing from all the hassles of staying with parents and the hunger that often strikes her home only to move into a worse situation because, to her, as long as she had a man, all her world would be complete.
Lost to her is the fact that at least her parents were loving and caring and though not having enough, she never slept on an empty stomach.
Hundreds of girls in our country have left their family homes to go and stay with strangers they would call boyfriends.
“Some people say these girls are at times forced by circumstances at their homes, I refuse to believe this and I say it is definitely by choice, every family has its problems and no normal person leaves their family because of that,” said a fellow student who refused me permission to name her. She looked upset about it. “Every problem can be solved, we have social leaders everywhere who can help in such cases. So there is no excuse for these girls to leave their homes, they are doing it for pleasure, nothing beats being with your lover every time but just like all the most enjoyable things in life it is not safe, and people have been warned against staying with men they are not married to but they do not listen.”
These ladies at the end of the day come out wanting the world to feel sorry for them, that is if they survived.
Young women do not even care and go as far as abandoning their studies and go stay with a man who, after a month into the relationship, starts cheating, beating and neglecting her.
It will surprise you that after two years, the girl is still stuck in that relationship because there is nowhere to go.
What about her family? They have not disowned her but she would rather go to the streets to try prostitution while in search of another man who will repeat what she had been through before.
Now she is burdened with a bit of shame and avoids all she used to know, making matters worse for herself. She is now a statistic in some Non Governmental Organisation’s books. The future is all but sealed.
If she does not taking herself seriously, who else can respect her take her seriously.
Our sisters endure all kinds of abuse under the hands of these men they have trusted with their lives.
They are being emotionally, physically and sexually abused by their so-called lovers but the freedom that society has given us keeps away authority of those who care. These brothers treat these young women like trash, like some kind of possession that they can use for whatever they wish. We know that these cowardly men are doing is not right but one can hardly blame them; it is these women again who make themselves available for these abuses.
Who, anyway, can take seriously someone who cannot do anything with their lives, cannot work nor study and are not even trying.
Osale Gosaitse, a victim of these abuses who managed to escape the dreary life, said that she was working as a shop assistant at one of the local retail stores. The man she was with made her quit her job, saying he would provide for her, just a ploy to make the woman totally dependent on him to gain more control over her.
“A few months after I left my job, he started calling me useless and would beat me up whenever I responded,” said Gosaitse.
Asked why she did not leave when all this started, she said that she did not have anywhere else to go and that she and her family were no longer on good terms.
But it is an obligation to parents and guardians to take back their children and try to set them back on the proper path, to deliver them from naivet├®.
With loving friends and relatives around, it is never too late to heal!
