AFRICA
TESTIMONIES

ROSE’S WOMEN
Agnes, Teddy, Ketty, and Florence, women who had grown up in the slums or been kidnapped by the rebels or abandoned by their families, all have HIV and had given up on life.  Help in obtaining medicine was not enough to change everything. These women, together with Rose Busingye, director of the Meeting Point of Kampala, relate how their life and self-worth were re-born.

by Alessandra Stoppa

“Even a decisive value like life can be dimmed. Only in the Christian encounter is it illuminated again in all its beauty.” In this period, Fr. Julián Carrón has been sharing all he has learned from his Ugandan friend, Rose Busingye, a member of the Memores Domini and a nurse who directs the International Meeting Point of Kampala, the small NGO created over 20 years ago to accompany the ill, poor, and children, many of them orphans, who now can attend school thanks to sponsorships. “Rose wanted to respond to the provocation of the women with AIDS, helping them obtain medicine,” recounts Carrón. But even once they had medicine, they did not take care of themselves. “Only by announcing Christ to them were they re-awakened to the consciousness of the value of life.”
Teddy, Agnes, Florence, and Ketty are in Rose’s office with her. They are very beautiful. Teddy bursts out right away: “Happiness has made us young and beautiful!” They all break out laughing. A couple of times, talking about themselves, they start singing–one starts, and the others join in. They give of themselves, even with a song, via Skype. It should be known that “Rose’s women” have had hard lives–growing up in the misery of the slums, or being kidnapped by the rebels, or being abandoned by everyone, and, in the end, becoming infected with AIDS. But they are full of grace too, because this marked the beginning, and for this they continue to say thank you, even for their work, breaking boulders with a hammer in the quarries among the famous crumbly hills of Kireka. They hammer hard under the sun until the large stones are  reduced to small rocks to sell to builders.
Agnes is 46, with a round, laughing face. You would never imagine that she is sick. “I felt like I was a nothing.” The rebels had kept her with them in the forest for three years. When she returned to the village, “I wasn’t anyone anymore, just a killer.” When she would go out of her house, people were afraid of her and avoided her, so she decided to escape to the city and stay with an aunt there. But when her aunt discovered her illness, she put her in a shack outside the house, without food or medicine. Some neighbors, who knew about the Meeting Point, sent “Auntie Rose” to her. When Rose arrived, Agnes was lying in bed. Rose brought her medicine, as she did for all the sick. “But very often,” adds Rose, “when I returned to visit them, I found the pills still there.”

Another question. Agnes recounts, “She was always telling me that I had value, but I didn’t understand what she was saying. Then she invited me to come here. I found women who were happy, who didn’t seem sick, and I thought I must have made a mistake and come to the wrong place, because I couldn’t belong to these people. I continued to feel like I was a nothing, to the point that I tried to find 20,000 shillings to return to my village and die.” She never did go, because when she asked Rose for the money, Rose cried. She has accepted care, and is doing better. She is still sick, but her deeper wound is healed. “When I began going to School of Community, I discovered the value Rose was telling me about, because Giussani says that nobody is nothing in God’s eyes. I sinned, I killed, but to Him, I am someone. This is my worth, the life God has given me. Because of this love, I have begun to have energy that medicine did not give me. I am free, even if I am sick.”
Rose has been with them every day for years, but for her, nothing is taken for granted. She has always been happy to be able to give her life in this way, but she saw that the sick people continued to complain. Some hung themselves or let themselves die. Nothing is ever enough for the poor. The children did not want to go to school, even though it was provided for free. “I started out thinking that the problem was medicine and food. But I gave it to them, and nothing happened. I was destroyed, because I wanted to solve the epidemic this way!” The temptation is to focus more on the things we must or can do for a person, rather than on the person herself. “Instead, at a certain point, everything started from the discovery of myself.” But Rose stops telling her story, and will finish later, so her women can speak first.
Teddy sees that she has changed by the fact that she is no longer afraid of anything, not even death, “because God knows all that I am.” She discovered this with the faith, in the journey of School of Community. She had lost her parents as a girl and thought that when she got married everything would work out. “Instead, much bigger problems began there. For me, there was no sense in staying in the world anymore; I hadn’t seen anything beautiful in life.” Rose expresses it this way: “Unhappiness arrives when you have decided that it is no longer possible to be happy.” And Teddy was unhappy. At the Meeting Point she found work as a social assistant, but she succumbed to the weight of the problems. “School of Community set me before another question: Who am I?” From the very first meeting, the things she read spoke of her. She felt she was the Samaritan woman at the well, who encountered a stranger who knew her more than her husband. Her marriage is a torment, because her husband is an alcoholic and when he drinks he becomes violent. There are nights when he does not even let her sleep in the house. Jealous of the Meeting Point, he rants, “You continue going to that place and brainwash you. You should think about the money!” She answers that the only reason she and he are still together is because of this place. “When he is sober he realizes and tells me, ‘Fr. Giussani is an intelligent man,’” Teddy smiles. Asked why she hasn’t left him, she answers, “I could never do it. If I am of infinite worth, so is he.”
Ketty understands this. She remembers how badly her body smelled when she arrived at the Meeting Point, but nobody was disgusted by her. She got married when she was 13, a Muslim at the time. She spent a year and a half with the rebels, who took away her month-old son. They made her eat human flesh, and they raped her. When she got pregnant, she was no longer of use to anybody. “So they threw me away.” She was 17 by then and screamed like a crazy woman. She was a skeleton of 55 pounds and yet people were afraid of her. Then her family abandoned her when she was diagnosed with AIDS. What made her want to live? “Rose looked at me as the person that I didn’t know I was. And School of Community freed me; I discovered that even in the woods I had the same worth as I do now.” She asked to be baptized.
Florence introduces herself this way: “I am 40, I come from eastern Uganda, and I have AIDS.” When the HIV exam turned out positive, her relatives feared she would infect them, and they counted the days until her death. “So then, I only thought about dying.” She moved to Kampala for treatment, “but I had already given up on living.” Even though people told her about the Meeting Point, she didn’t go. “If all my relatives abandoned me, who could want me?” But one day, looking at her children, always closed up in the house with her, she understood that she had to do it for them. “I arrived here and I found the women, who were even learning how to read and write. I began treatment right away.” When paying her rent became a problem, she ran away, but Teddy went looking for her. “They took me back with them.” Today, her relatives see her happy, see that her children go to school, and ask her how all this is possible. “Who stayed with you?” “I say, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” For years, Rose has been immersed every day in a reality of suffering, and she stays in the midst of it like a child who abandons herself to her father. “Neither the medicine nor the words changed anything in them. Without living the fact that I am loved, I can’t help the others.” She needed to be conscious of the way Jesus looked at her. “I could only tell them about their worth if I knew my own.” For Rose, this worth was inseparable from the way Giussani treated her: “He looked at me like someone special, bigger than everything, even bigger than my limits. I always thought that he didn’t understand who I was. I tried to explain it to him, but he wouldn’t listen to me. ‘Look, Rose,’ he told me, ‘you don’t know that if you were the last person on the face of the earth, God would have come and died for you.’ Then he corrected himself, ‘He came and died for you.’”

“He did not stop.” What Rose did and does is to be open to this love she encounters. “Today, I follow Carrón, curious about what makes him the way he is.” She goes forward like this, finding “problems, contradictions, or my incapacity, but these limitations also become a way into the infinite.” Sitting in the midst of her women, she tells how she realized it: “What did I do today affirming God? Nothing. Not even at Mass, or praying, did I affirm God. But He did not stop; He continued to be there for me, to count my cells. I didn’t remember Him, but once again today He left Himself, to tear me away from nothingness. We stop being aware of this, and we lose ourselves in little things, in stupid irritations, but if we knew what greatness is ours, what greatness the others are, we would cry!” And so she finds herself again, because “grace” becomes deeply moved emotion, and becomes consciousness. She says, “Who is Rose, that you care for her?”