Mothering the motherless for over 56 years

We all love children but the story of 79-year-old Bena Nakijoba proves that for some people, it is a calling.

Like Mother Theresa, all Nakijoba has done with her life is to take care of children with so much passion that she had to sacrifice her dreams to save motherless children from death.

Nakijoba’s special love for children seems to have been sparked by a set of unfortunate events. When she dropped out of school in Primary Six because of lack of school fees, she was immediately married off. She was a mere 15-year old child who had wanted to continue with school like her friends but fate wouldn’t have it.

Things started turning dark when the first year ended with no pregnancy.

The family started looking at her with questioning eyes and her husband treated her badly. Nakijoba prayed that God would help her get pregnant but all was in vain. For eight years, there was no pregnancy no matter what remedies she tried. Her husband treated her with disdain and life became very sad. Her prospects of staying in the marriage were getting slimmer every day. One morning, she walked out on her husband never to return.

“I needed to be as far away from my village as possible because so many words had been spoken about me, so I travelled to Kampala in 1962. My mother knew someone in Namulonge Research Institute and she was okay hosting me for some time,” says Nakijoba.

There was an expatriate couple at the research institute who needed a nanny and the lady with whom Nakijoba stayed recommended her because she loved children and was very clean. She looked after those four children until early 1970 when the expatriates left the country. Nakijoba moved to Wandegeya in the hope of starting a daycare business.

Juggling daycare and market business

When she arrived in Wandegeya, she rented a spacious house so that it could serve as her home and her business centre. “God had given me so much love for children and yet refused to give me a child of my own. I think this was purposeful. Since I didn’t have a child of my own, I had all the time and love to care for children who needed it,” says Nakijoba.

Nakijoba moved around the neighbourhood telling people that she had started a day care centre. Within a few weeks, she was looking after five babies daily.

Her job was to look after them until their mothers picked them up after 5pm. By the end of the year, she was looking after 18 preschool children in her daycare.

“The business was very good because people paid me well. My clients told their friends about my loving care for children. I lived a fairly comfortable life, ate well and looked healthy and fat. After one year, I opened up a side business in Wandegeya Market as a way of reinvesting my savings. I started a clothes shop and put an employee in charge. I would check on her once or twice during the day,” Nakijoba says.

During this time, man after man came asking for her hand in marriage but she refused. She couldn’t get herself to enter marriage again because of the trauma from the eight years she was married.

Miraculously, in 1979, she became pregnant for her boyfriend and had a baby boy. By this time, she was 40 and had given up on ever getting pregnant. In her mind, if she had failed to get pregnant at 15, she could not conceive at 40. The war that broke out at the downfall of Idi Amin found her with a small baby.

“On the day that Amin was ousted, there was a lot of tension in Kampala. There was the sound of bullets everywhere and I decided to flee the central part of Kampala until the situation stabilised.

I fled Wandegeya with all the babies in my care that day and camped somewhere in Mpererwe, five kilometres out of the city. With some neighbours helping to carry the children, we fled on foot, reached safely and cooked for the children. We went during the day, stayed there for one night and came back having made sure that everything was back to normal,” Nakijoba says.

The parents of the children were pleased with her instead of being angry that she had run away with their children. They trusted her and felt it was responsible of her to run.

Sadly, six of the parents never came back for their children, and no matter what she did, Nakijoba never got to know what became of those parents. She suspects they died.

This was the beginning of a new chapter in her life. Those six children would henceforth become her own children on top of her own son who was three months old.

How HIV/Aids changed everything

Shortly after the National Resistance Army took over government in 1986, things were starting to look hopeful. The economy was beginning to wake up and Nakijoba’s daycare business was beginning to turn green.

All of a sudden things changed. People started dying of a strange disease that had no cure.

It was nicknamed slim because the patients of the new disease would lose weight until they almost had no flesh on their bones. The Aids epidemic had come to stay.

From the late 1980s onward, the death toll rose greatly because of the Aids epidemic, and with it, the number of orphans was skyrocketing.

This was another turning point in Nakijoba’s life only this time, it was like no other. Katanga had become a fully-fledged, overpopulated slum by now and several of the people who died were well known to Nakijoba. Some of them had left orphans with no family to fall back on. Nakijoba was convicted to take on these helpless children because of her extraordinary love for the little ones.

She kept taking on orphans and by 1999, Nakijoba had 25 children in her house all feeding from her hands and brow.

The number of children kept on growing until her little home was a thick network of triple bunker beds. By 2007, she was taking care of 35 children. A few of the children were in their early teens and helped in taking care of the smaller ones. The smaller children were sleeping in fours under the same blanket while the older ones were sleeping in threes. Only the teens were sleeping in twos.

A newspaper story was published in one of the dailies about her plight and Nakijoba got her long awaited break at the age of 66. Several people came to lend a helping hand including a well connected expatriate that she only knows as Jasmine.

Her children were taken for medical treatment.

Soon after that, the children were transferred to Watoto Child Care Ministries, and the older ones were put in boarding schools. Many have since finished university and other tertiary institutions, while others are doing businesses around the country.

A home was built for the old woman in Kajjansi on Entebbe Road and for the first time since 1970, she was not living in a slum anymore. There are 11 children still under her care; four in primary school and seven in secondary school.