THE POWER OF WORDS IN FIGHTING SRGBV Winnie Namata UNATU (Uganda National Teachers Union)
Forever is supposed to be a beautiful thing. I mean, people declare to their loved ones, “I will love you, forever.” We even have millennial slang such as BFF to mean “Best Friends Forever”. It is such a beautiful feeling when the people and things we love assure us that those good vibes will never go away. Our hearts do little ‘flip-flop’ dances when we think about these beautiful memories. Walking this journey, unveiling and unwrapping layer after layer on what School Related Gender Based Violence (SRGBV) is, my heart is suddenly filled with mixed emotions. “Maybe not everything should last forever.” These workshops have taken me down memory lane and made me relive emotions which I thought I had carefully tucked away at the back of mind and left inside those school walls. It has finally dawned on me that though not physical, my friends and I have in a way been victims of SRGBV. We can no longer talk about those ‘poor girls’. We are part of the statistics. We are one of them. Those girls are us! It is a sad feeling, one that is made worse by the fact that if ever an opportunity presented itself and we were to face those responsible, they would quickly dismiss our pain. After all, it was just ‘WORDS’. It is important for our teachers to know that while they credit themselves for influencing eternity through their spoken word, in the same way, some of their words can leave a wound that may never heal in the lives of the learners. I am one of those girls who attended all the best schools right from Kindergarten. I was born and raised in the capital of Kampala and like my peers, school life
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