In 2012 I met the women farmers of Kobulubulu who made up the savings collective called KRMA. Since that time, we had communicated by email and an occasional phone call with an English speaking KRMA member. Now that I had returned to Kobulubulu with Board member Lindsey Holaday, after forming krma-US Partners in the Washington, D.C. area to support these women, we would find out if our cumbersome communications were truly on the same wavelength. Our first task (myself and Lindsey Holaday, who accompanied me on this trip to Uganda) was to meet with their chosen executive committee, a group of women made up of their current chair, Beatrice; their founder and project director, Judith; their treasurer, Monica; their facilitator and last year’s chair, Proscovia; and our liaison Anne, who would also serve as our translator.

I have fallen in love. Not with another man. My husband is still the love of my life. But with a group of courageous women in Kobulubulu, Uganda.

Shall I tell you their story? Not so very long ago, Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army rampaged the village and countryside around Kobulubulu, abducting young girls from their primary school, raping and pillaging and plunging this District into a state of terror. Eight women seeking to keep themselves and their hungry children alive at the nearby Internally Displaced Persons Camp gathered to pray. They were known in the camp as the Widows Prayer Group because their husbands were off fighting Kony and everyone assumed they would be killed.