Mark Mwesiga's Blog

During School Holidays; Some of the children spend their time watching television while those in villages up country are occupied with domestic chores. Most parents and guardians leave the housemaids to care for the children. This has exposed some children to continued harassment or mistreatment in many forms but mostly verbal abuse. Some of the children who are victims choose to hide this truth from the parents or working guardians. They always fear the consequences in the absence of their parents, who are rare anyway. Some of the children therefore never enjoy their holidays at home. It’s a place of terror. Some parents in urban areas send children to spend holidays with relatives or friends up country. The reasons for this are numerous, including the promise of food supply in villages. Some of the parents genuinely send the children to their native home so that they can learn about the culture or their mother tongue. All these are sound reasons but some of the children have fallen p...

I read Orumuri every Monday and many stories show there is an increase in domestic violence. Mothers are maiming their husbands because of persistent unresolved conflicts and women have not been spared too. Fathers have continued to murder their children and even defiling them! Extra-marital affairs are also on the increase. Reports from the Uganda AIDS commission show HIV prevalence is higher in married couples than in other groups. As a social worker with vulnerable groups of people in rural area, I have found out that too much consumption of alcohol is one of the major causes of those problems. Redundancy and spending too much time in bars and town centres are also to blame. Whereas the world prices of essential commodities continue to raise, prices for local alcohol remain reasonable. At sh300, one can can get a glass of enguli. With no graduated tax to worry about, and their children in cheap UPE schools, poor people who do casual work can afford this kind of price. When they have...