It is now a year since peace talks between the Ugandan government and the Lord's Resistance began in Sudan. A year later little has changed and people are still suffering, especially women and children. Harriet Acan, a co-worker at the SOS Children's Village Gulu, explains:

The endless war in northern Uganda has affected mostly women and children. Many women have become widows as a result of the rebels killing their husbands. Consequently, they are overloaded with the heavy responsibility of looking after orphans.

And women do not have time to rest. They wake up early in the morning to find ways of feeding their children, with whom they have to move long distances in search of food. At the end of the day, they come back very tired, and so stressed and frustrated that they cannot sleep at night.

The majority of women are suffering due to the loss of their husbands and relatives. They look for money to take their children to school yet they have no proper source of income, nobody to give them a hand, because almost everybody finds herself in the same situation.

The war leaves bad memories

Socially, most women have low self-esteem as a result of this war that has left with them lifelong bad memories. Either they have been sexually abused by the rebels and other people taking advantage of war, or they have been abducted from their families and taken to the bush, where they have seen their loved ones being slaughtered, including their own children. They find themselves lonely and isolated leading to low self-esteem and inability to cope in the society.

Many young women are child mothers who bore children after being forced into marriage by the rebels at a young age. This has really affected their own mothers who see their daughters returning home, at the age of 20, with several children. And the social life of the Acholi women has greatly changed. Some women have become unfaithful while others have unwanted pregnancies and end up either aborting or abandoning the babies on failing to be supported.

Children are traumatised

Children, on the other hand, have been so much abused. They return home from the bush when they are mentally traumatised and unable to live with other normal children. They display inappropriate behaviours to the extent that handling them requires specialists, who are lacking in our community. Men have abandoned their families and children have suffered most. This explains why there is an increasing number of street children in Gulu town and other towns in northern Uganda.

However, despite the overwhelming numbers of needy children, organisations such as SOS Children's Villages are playing a very important role in preventing child abandonment and catering for the orphaned and abandoned children of northern Uganda. For the sake of the women and children of northern Uganda, the peace talks must not fail.