Perseverance, patience, and resilience have surely been learned and exercised. An entire three months have gone by since I became a northerner. Fully immersed in the culture, traditions, and language of this new site, I can gladly say I am a lambya and chindali speaker. In the past three months, I kept an open mind and involved myself in different activities that helped me create a bond and trust with my community members.
With my host family leaving the community without my knowledge, I mean I was left with no family but myself and it was a tough journey. With a family of 5 to be left with none of the family members and some community members making fun of the situation, I am now a lady without parents in the community. Even though this happened, I have made a lot of close relationships that have been helping me out in my work life and free time so that I can keep feeling part of the community.
My volunteer life had to go on, therefore, to achieve this, using small-scale high-impact ideas I and the people in my community conducted a reusable sanitary pad-making training. This activity brought about a great lesson for the women in my community. I impacted 33 direct people and many more who were also taught by their families and friends.
In the third month of my integration, I vouched to take part in ending gender-based violence and as a community, we organized a campaign to sensitize people about violence. I invited government offices to come and speak to the people about gender-based Violence and how people can help stop this behavior. Many people heard the message and had questions which were clarified by our police officer and the gender and social welfare offices. The different topics that were tackled brought about a lot of questions on violence that men face and how they can go about such issues. One of the speakers, a police officer, clarified the issue and we were all glad that people were able to understand gender-based violence.
Ending my four months I had to finish working towards our sustainable development goals which aim at dealing with climate change through different ways one of which is afforestation. In January I worked with the Namatubi Network Foundation to plant 530 trees by making woodlots and orchards in different villages that were planted successfully.
To conclude, throughout this journey, I have learned of different people who have also made me strong, such as people who speak to me in their language just because they want to tease me, people who ask questions just to annoy me to mention a few but I did not give up or lose my dignity. One thing my volunteer life has taught me is patience, perseverance, and resilience as I work with my community members, of which I know I am coming out as a strong volunteer.
