There Is Nothing to Go Back To

Maria, DRC

She was born and raised in the DRC, but it could no longer remain her home.

Her husband was killed. She knew she and her children would be next, and so, she fled.

On the journey out of Congo, she says she was raped. It is something she speaks about quietly, almost as though saying it too loudly would force her to relive it all over again.

She arrived in Uganda in 2012 with her three children. Since then, she says life has been difficult. She repeats it often. Life is difficult here.

There is nothing for her to go back to. Her husband is gone. The life she knew disappeared years ago. So she stays and tries to survive in Kampala, even when survival itself feels expensive.

Money is what she needs… for everything. To keep food on the table, to pay school fees for her children, to pay rent for her small shop, to buy medicine, to survive another month.

Back home, she says, she used to sell fridges. Life was different then. Now she sells beans, cassava, soda, sometimes Fanta. Small things. Whatever people can buy quickly. She has a tiny store, but even keeping it open is a struggle. Rent is always due, and some months she barely earns enough to keep the space. She worries constantly about losing the shop because without it, she does not know how her family would survive.

The business itself is unstable. She does not have enough money for proper licensing or for a more secure stall. Money she simply does not have. And hawking is illegal. So every day she goes out to sell, she risks being caught by the KCCA, who can take away her stock in an instant. Sometimes what she loses in one day is everything she had invested for that week.

She also lives with HIV and high blood pressure. The HIV medicine may be free, but the medication for her blood pressure is not. Yet she must take it daily. The stress, she says, only worsens her condition. Some mornings she wakes up already exhausted, her body heavy before the day has even begun. But resting is a luxury she cannot afford. If she does not open the shop, there is no money. If there is no money, there is no rent, no medicine, no food.

Her children are grown now, but she says there are no jobs for them either. They try where they can, help where they can, but work is scarce. The burden still falls back onto her.

Still, every morning she wakes up and opens her shop. She arranges the cassava, the beans, the bottles of soda, hoping the day will be enough. Enough for rent. Enough for medicine. Enough for food. Enough to keep going one more day.