Rose Mbowa

"One thing I learnt, I've never listened to people. It made me realise I'm a bad listener, it has tended to help me check on that. And as a facilitator it is important that my listening becomes very, very powerful. It helped me enormously to improve relationships between me and my son. We listen to each other a lot now."

"Of Course, also, we were surprised that those young people were there, but they had grouped themselves and they wanted to stay and of course our immediate reaction was 'these are too young' but their parents also said they wanted them to be involved. Now a number of them were orphans,who were being assisted by some of their relatives. Some, maybe one or two, had their parents, but the older people felt that these girls should be involved, because they know most of the facts from their health education program which is in their school curriculum. In their primary health education they meet with these things. So their involvement in this workshop would not only address some of their immediate problems, but also the future. They found it very useful."

"Those of the 14-16 year olds seem to have all been sexually abused, not that they have boyfriends, but they have been abused by men in society, in their community."

"What the boys are saying, is that any boy seeing a beautiful girl would be excited, would be attracted to that girl, but the mini-skirt exposes so much of them that they find that they want to see more of the girls! That was their request. But then the community said of course, that there is freedom, freedom of what people can do: but that the young girls should know, they should not jump on any fashion that comes, they should know the risks they are taking in putting on things like that."

"The older men's request was for the women to be faithful. This is an urban situation, and one of the problems we found out about early on in Entebbe, was that the man would come back and go to the beer place and drink. The woman, of course, being neglected at home would walk out and go to another place to drink and the children would be left alone. One of the women’ dramas showed that: one of the boys became a drug addict, the girl got pregnant and the parents had to resolve all the problems by getting back together."