Because I want to capture all the details to this story well, I will write it in parts.
My friend Ivan is an engineer who has done a lot of civil road works in Karamoja and beyond. He narrated to me an incident where he was driving to the site of a road his firm was opening in Kaabong district when they met group of young Karimojong women bathing in the middle of the bridge they were meant to go across. Irish bridges are common in Karamoja; water flows over them and not under them as is the case with the bridges most of us are more familiar with. People, almost always men, bathing near bridges, culverts or basically anywhere there is a pool of stagnant water is near norm.
A group of young women bathing in the open is not as common. What is common, though, is finding these groups of young women comprising anything in number from between 6 and 15 and ages I’ve personally estimated to be between 13-21 going about their business which normally is returning from a harvest, prayers, or heading for a dance. These groups are the one thing you may be fortunate or unfortunate to encounter depending on whether you’re the observer or bearer of the brunt of their shenanigans.
The girls are cheeky and notoriously naughty. They tease with their words and laughter and can make even the most sturdy person nervous and unsure of themselves. Of course they love the effect they have on their victims. If they didn’t, why then would they laugh the way they do; with so much excitement and glee?
Ivan told me that even when their car stopped and waited for them to move aside so they could cross the road, the young women did not. They continued to play in the water, laughing and teasing the people (men) in the vehicle. It soon became apparent that this was a game that they were enjoying. Like Ivan later learnt, you do best playing along with them. So while they continued to play in the middle of the bridge, they also proceeded to drive across it apparently oblivious of the young women; only then did they give way. As soon as the vehicle moved past across them, the girls burst into gleeful laughter because they had made the men wait for over an hour. They simply didn’t care. They were having fun.
I thought the same thing too last week when I was at the Sub County and a group of young girls of about 8 came to look for one of our medical staff. He had hired them to harvest groundnuts from his garden and they had but they did not know where to put them. It was around 4pm and I was headed to the field to check on one of the pasture plots we had been establishing so I was a little inconvenienced and worried that I may return late if I didn’t go early. I called him anyway and gave my phone to one of the girls to speak with him and he directed them on where to put them.
She returned my phone to me and just as I was riding away, a group of 4 young men in around their early twenties came and held the hand of the girl I had just given the phone to. Then they started to pull her and for a minute I thought they were play-fighting until seemingly from no process, they had lifted her off her feet. She was obviously in distress and struggling to free herself and only then did it occurr to me that I was witnessing first hand the grabbing of a girl for forced marriage.
To be continued…
