A 16-year-old Lillian always dreamt of becoming a medical doctor upon completing school. But her dreams were nearly shuttered in January 2017 when she was defiled. “It was Saturday evening when my mother sent me outside to go and buy food for supper. Then on coming outside, it was someplace which is not having all those people who are just in scattered places, scattered settlements, then on reaching someplace very far, a man of around 31 years I had never talked to grabbed me on the way.” Said, Lillian – Rape Victim. The school she was attending at the time had no sympathy for her situation when she was found to be pregnant. She was subsequently expelled. Lillian’s parents fought for justice and succeeded in having the man who had raped her get arrested and charged with rape. But this did nothing to diminish the trauma and sense of shame that Lillian felt. At this stage, her future looked blink.

“According to me I had enough money for an abortion but I could not abort. I had to bear with the situation because am not the one who caused that situation. I had to bear and keep the pregnancy until the time of delivery.” However, Lillian’s life took a turn for the better when she got connected to a Christian Counseling Center in Kitgum which secured her a place in Pader Girls School and she was soon completing Ordinary Level. On October 8th, Lillian gave birth to a bouncing baby boy at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Kitgum. She decided to call her son God Knows.

The Executive Director of Christian Counseling Center Denis Olak said the center was created in 2008 to remove the barriers to education for the young girls affected by the decades of conflicts in Northern Uganda. “Because if once she gets pregnant and you block her from going to school and yet you know that education enhances the cognitive ability this girl needs then we are doing a more dis-service to the girl.” They are 190 students at the center, and many of them are now child mothers benefiting from the accelerated Adult Learning Programme. However, the center’s efforts of offering hope to child mothers were being hampered by a lack of funds. And Olak said, it was getting harder to get donors for the center’s programmes.