From despair to success

People who saw the emaciated and depressed Rosemary Olela in 2005 would have a hard time believing she is the same person today. She has gone from suffering depression and being immobilised by illness to become an internationally recognised success story, symbolising hope and resilience in the face of challenges that women face with HIV.     

Rosemary was diagnosed with HIV in 2005, when information about it was still scanty and stigma was rife.

The mother of three was ostracised by friends and family, and even stopped from using the communal toilet in the Korogocho slum area where she lived.

With her trials and tribulations came depression and with her compromised immunity, tuberculosis took root and afflicted her for almost half a year.

Unemployed, hopeless and relying on government handouts, she had resigned herself to waiting for her death… until she met her friend Lucy Akinyi as they were queuing to get food from a church. “She was doing worse in health than I, but she told me we were not going anywhere and that I had to stay around longer for my children,” she says.

The friendship would be the anchor that held her as she sewed and beaded her way back to living with hope again.

Rosemary, who was a tailor until TB laid her low, decided to use what strength she had generated off her friend’s encouragement, to make some income. She started sewing tote bags and children’s clothes from scrap material and selling them to her neighbours in Korogocho.

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

But there were challenges to her business: Sometimes the neighbours wouldn’t pay. Business was coming along in fits and starts when she met a lady working with the African Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC) who was running a programme in the slum; she offered to help her generate more income.

The next day, she took her to a crafts exhibition at the KICC, set up a table for her and Rosemary proceeded to sell enough to generate Sh15,000.

She took this money back to her partner Lucy, and they invested in more sewing machines and set up a business in Korogocho, supplying both residents and people whose contacts she had collected at the KICC.

While the business was growing, Lucy and Rosemary also started a talk therapy support group for other people in the area living with HIV. They would meet to talk things out and encourage each other, but after a while, they realised they needed to do more than just talk: They needed to make money. And this is how the organisation Lucy and Rosemary run, Tuinuke Tuendelee Mbele, started.

Rosemary taught the willing participants to bead and sew.

Lucy took over the finance and administration tasks while Rosemary became the face of the organisation. As numbers grew, an NGO that had heard about their work put them in touch with the World Bank and Jhpiego, a reproductive health services provider, who both helped them materially and financially.

Today, Rosemary’s organisation is located in a three-bedroom house in Kariobangi, where they run a workshop for the tailoring business and display their items for sale. The programme has expanded to take in young, pregnant women from Korogocho, as well as counselling and medical support for people living with HIV.

It supports more than 4,000 women. Rosemary is living proof that one does not have to be well-off or in perfect health to get to where one needs.

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ROSY OHON, GOSPEL SINGER AND CHILD SAFETY ADVOCATE

While many people would consider being sexually abused as a child so shameful an act that it requires burying, Rosy Ohon uses it to give her the strength to speak out against child sexual abuse. A passionate singer whose music touches many, she is a brand ambassador for 160 Girls, a global campaign that that protects girls from this horrible act.

Rosy was abused as a child by a friend of her family. Although she was not threatened into keeping it quiet, she was silenced by the internal shame that she felt. “I knew that something very wrong was done to me, something that should not have been done,” she says.

The atmosphere at home did not encourage openness about matters as sensitive as defilement, and so Rosy chose silence, a decision that ate away her confidence as she grew up. “I never gathered the courage to talk,” she says. “That made me grow up scarred and broken.”

Even when she met her husband Donald, it took her many years of dating to finally open up to him about what had happened to her. He was the first person she ever told about her ordeal.

She says she felt vulnerable doing so and thought she may be rejected or perceived differently… but she also felt proud to have found the courage to reach deep inside and confront her ghosts. And she found the right person to do this with, as Donald has been nothing but supportive and loving of her. “He has been more than a husband,” she says.

When Rosy and Donald became parents to their first daughter, Rosy was spurred to action: the thought of any child going through what happened to her was her impetus. She decided to use her music to pass her message. In 2003, Rosy wrote the song Watoto, a catchy tune that asked adults to stop hurting children sexually.  Now she has a new single, Say No, on the same subject.

“Someone has got to do it – you know, fight for children,” she says. “There cannot be too many voices (speaking out).”

She and her husband have been married nearly two decades now, and have three children –  Hope, 16, Joy, 11 and Imani, nine.

Rosy acknowledges that with the changing times, there has been a difference in the way these conversations are handled. “Now, children open up to their parents but opening up is not enough. Now (parents) have to worry about whether (they) will give the right response when the kids finally open up,” she says.

Since her first album in 2003, which contains the single Watoto, Rosy has visited more than 50 schools from primary to tertiary learning institutions, held more than 20 music shows and has been invited to churches to speak on the subject.