In Summary
Daring to look ahead: A past with barely nothing to call one’s own can easily make one choose the wrong path, but for Rehema Nsanyiwa, it gave her the inspiration she needed to create Girlbe, and touch lives of young women.
At five, Rehema Nsayiwa lost her mother to the HIV/Aids scourge. She became homeless and went to the streets looking for a place to stay and family to live with. She found some family members but life was difficult there.
First, she stayed with her uncle but his wife mistreated her, denying her a chance to read her school books at home, assigning her a lot of housework, not providing her with tea or snack, sending her late to the well in addition to verbal abuse. She could not take it for long so she chose to run away. She was in Primary Five at the time. Her uncle did not care much in helping her pursue her education. He never paid her school dues from her mother’s inheritance as agreed by the family.
When she left her uncle’s home, she went to live with her aunt in Nsambya. That was where she got to interact with fellow youngsters, and got introduced to Break dance Project where young people are nurtured to become more aware of themselves, using their power to change communities they come from through breakdance.
When her aunt’s husband learned of it, he asked Nsanyiwa to stop being part of it because it involved interacting with boys. At his house, girls dressed up in long skirts not big trousers like ‘spoilt girls’ as he described them.
“And because I loved Break Dance Project Uganda, I left his house but did not know where I was going. I went down to the ghetto, to an old friend, who offered me a room for a while,” she recounts.
This was in the not-so beautiful backwaters of the city in Nsambya. The room leaked heavily every time it rained. The 23-year-old remembers waking up and finding all her books soaked in water. It broke her heart but she kept focused on continuing in school.
Without a guardian but the project, she kept in school. It was difficult but she was bright and always came out on top of her class in addition to being entrusted with leadership roles such being head girl and class captain.
Nsanyiwa dances with a friend. Dance is one of the ways through which beneficiaries of Girlbe are taught and socially linked Photos by EDGAR R. BATTE.
Prior to joining Break Dance Project Uganda, she would always be sent home for school fees, which stressed her. When she joined the project, she was supported in school. That was during her Senior Four. A supporter, Caro Bader, who was a friend of the project, offered to pay her school fees, which was about Shs180, 000 per term.
Nsanyiwa attended school at Wheeling Preparatory School in Kansanga, Tropical High School in Kabalagala, New Castle High School in Kansanga and St. Peter’s Senior Secondary School in Nsambya where she dropped out in Senior Five.
When she lost hope for continuing in school after her sponsor returned to Germany, she started doing laundry for people around her neighbourhood in Kabalagala and Nsambya.
She taught Luganda to foreigners she met, and when she went home, she would meet children and help them with their homework, mentor them and for those that needed scholastic requirements, she would take some money from her meagre earnings to buy them the requirements.
She also hang out at arts’ spaces such as Art In Movement, The Hatchery and at Bayimba International Festival of the arts.
That is where she met some of the foreigners she taught Luganda. As she split time between washing people’s clothes and attending workshops, all this resonated with the suffering she had undergone as a girl.
At that point, she got motivated to start a not-for-profit organisation called Girlbe, dedicated to empowering girls and women aged from seven to 25, through creative means of learning.
Reaching out to others like her
The difficulties she had experienced first-hand as she grew up struggling to access education, her exposure to HIV/Aids, alcoholism in Kansanga where she was raised. Her father was an alcoholic and homelessness all motivated her to start on a journey to give back to children and young women what she had not had.
“I envisioned a society of empowered young women, equipped with the awareness and the ability to create positive social, economic and political change to transform their lives and uplift their communities,” Nsanyiwa explains, adding that Girlbe stands for “Girl be who you dream, to be yourself”.
She composed herself to achieve this by being that girl, the dreamer, the one that deliberately questions existence or any conventional way of life to alter fundamental negatives practices and behaviour.
She operates in Kansanga’s communities of Kiyembe and Maasana zones. To deal with the youngsters, Nsanyiwa has learnt and still stays open to learn, believes in herself and sometimes lets experiences explain other experiences especially when things do not make sense.
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