Joan

At the Human Rights Centre, a young woman lives within the office compound with a newborn baby. I found out more about her story today.

Her name is Joan. In January, the night guard brought her to the office, introduced her as his sister, and asked if she could help out. She's been there ever since.

The night guard is a policeman who works full time during the day, and then comes to guard the compound overnight. After a few mishaps hiring private security guards, Human Rights Centre now pays the police to provide a guard, and this one was sent to us after volunteering to work extra hours. We usually leave around 5.00pm, and he doesn't arrive until about 8.00pm. Compounds or properties are rarely ever left without someone on the premises, so he suggested to Margaret that Joan could watch the premises for the few hours in the evenings before he arrived, and in addition could clean the office, work in the garden, and do other odd jobs around the place. It seemed a good solution to what had been an awkward problem for the Centre, so it was agreed that she could sleep in a room attached to the garage and use the Centre's kitchen.

Joan had only been there for a few weeks when it became obvious that she was pregnant. There was no husband, and when they asked why she was not with her family, the guard told them that her family were in the countryside. It was obvious that she didn't have anywhere else to go, so they didn't turn her away.

About three weeks ago, Margaret arrived at the office one morning to hear that Joan had gone to have her baby. When she felt the baby coming, someone took her to the hospital on a boda boda, Kampala's ubiquitous motorbike taxis. They're the cheapest and fastest way to get around, but they are infamously dangerous, ramshackle and rusty, swerving, thrusting and weaving through traffic, bumping and jolting over the city's cratered roads, and generally driving chaotically in all directions at top speed. Imagine a woman in labour travelling pillion. This was at about 10.00am – and at 2.00pm that same afternoon Joan arrived back to the office with a baby boy.

The baby had come early so she had not been prepared and had not gathered anything that she would need. She had no baby clothes, blankets, nappies, bedding, towels or anything else. She had only the few pieces of clothes for herself which she had arrived with, and a mat on the floor with a sheet where she slept. She brought the baby back from the hospital (presumably also on a boda, although I didn't get that detail) wrapped in a bed sheet and gathered to her chest inside the t-shirt that she herself wore. She had had stitches but had no pain killers. When they went in and out that afternoon to see how she was doing, she mentioned that she was dizzy, and then they learned that she hadn't had anything to eat all day. She had no idea why her breasts were so sore, or how to make herself more comfortable, or how to wash the baby or what to cover him with or how to do anything. And she was alone, in a room attached to a garage.

They brought food for her and made her tea. One of Margaret's daughters has young children, so she asked her for their unwanted baby things and brought Joan a basket, baby clothes, some blankets, towels, and a mosquito net for the baby (crucially important in a malaria zone). They showed her how to look after the baby and the things that she needed to do for herself to recover. Eventually Margaret took aside the night guard and warned him that he needed to start buying Joan plenty of proper food and soap and the other things she would need. When he didn't seem to take the warning too seriously, Margaret told him that if he didn't start looking after Joan, he would be fired. After all, if anything was to happen to either her or the baby the Human Rights Centre or Margaret herself could very likely be held responsible.

No one has ever heard the full details of the story, but this is what they have more or less worked out. Joan of course is not the night guard's sister. She is from the countryside and had probably come to Kampala for a job. The girls in the office guess that she might be around 28; not particularly young. We presume that she met the night guard, but in any event she became pregnant, and must have lost her job as a result. The fact that he brought her to the Human Rights Centre rather than to the police barracks (where policemen and their families live) suggests that he already has a wife and possibly a family.

Some time after the baby was born, Margaret asked Joan where her family were (“In the village”), and whether she had told them about the baby. “Maybe I will some day,” she replied. Obviously she is afraid to go back or to tell them. She doesn't visit friends in Kampala and doesn't have any visitors, so it seems she doesn't know anyone else. She remains entirely dependent on the night guard; without him she wouldn't have any money, or any food, and the police are paid very little in Uganda so that if he really does have another family, he cannot have much money to give her. Other than the staff in the office, she doesn't even see anyone else; she rarely even leaves the compound. The guard doesn't seem too perturbed. A few weeks before the baby was born, Margaret told him that he should get someone to come and stay with Joan for the few hours each evening that she was alone at the compound in case she went into labour, but this never happened. And in the end she had to threaten him with dismissal before he began to take care of Joan properly.

'Women's rights' and 'gender-inequality' are annoying terms you hear in newspapers and op-eds and policy documents and politician's promises, near-meaningless but politically necessary buzz words, abstract concepts demanded by irritatingly outspoken women. But the whole point is that what happened to Joan could never happen to a man. A man won't ever have to even worry about the mere potential of a trap like this. I don't mean the inconvenience of having children come along and disrupt a perfectly middling life. I don't mean the economic pressures of trying to provide for an unplanned or additional child, or the damage to social reputation. I don't even mean the health risks or the pain or the very real dangers of giving birth and then recuperating in such conditions. I mean the isolation: the very real scenario of a young woman with a day-old baby entirely alone in the world, no means of obtaining an income, no idea how to care for her child, and almost without a roof over her head. The sheer aloneness of the girl in that situation. More than half of the world's population is female; for this to be the reality that the rest of us are lucky to avoid is unacceptable.

Joan called her baby boy William. He is about three weeks old, and he is beautiful. Joan is tall and strong, with a pretty smile and a shy bashfulness. The only real sign that she's just had a baby is her slightly stiffened walk; a trace hobbled. You wouldn't really notice it unless you'd heard the word 'stitches' (it gives me nightmares). She potters around with a floor brush and a mop in the mornings, sweeping floors that don't need to be swept, always cleaning Margaret's room first. Her feet hardly make a sound in her plastic flip flops. Most of the time you wouldn't know she or William are there.

So now, when they order lunch to be delivered to the office they sometimes order a little extra for Joan, and give her any leftovers. An NGO's budget is tightly planned and outlined in advance, but Margaret is hoping to be able to redistribute some money so that they could give Joan a small allowance for her work as a housekeeper.

We lock the office building every evening and leave Joan to her room facing onto the yard behind it. This evening when we were ready to leave, Alex (Margaret's driver) mentioned that Joan had gone to the market to buy food and said we should wait until she returned before locking up. She would be back shortly, he said, and then gestured to her little room, where a light showed through the gap where the uneven door didn't meet the frame. The baby was in there, he gestured.

“Alone?!” I gasped.

“No no, I watch him”, Alex said.

Alex is reliable and trustworthy, a skinny, gentle man who doesn't speak much English but who appreciatively nods and smiles and gestures when I talk to him. But he had been hovering near the car all evening, sheltering from the dense tropical rain which had been falling for over an hour, as if afraid to go near the baby in case he would hurt it. I ran over through the sheets of rain and looked in through the window, peering through the net curtain: no movement in the basket.

Margaret needed to go, she had an appointment. It would only take Alex a few minutes to drop her and drive back to the compound, so I offered to stay and wait until he came back. As soon as they'd gone I pushed the door open and tip-toed in to make sure that the baby really was all right. The room was tiny, not much bigger than an en suite bathroom at home. There was a plain concrete floor and a smell of damp and rain coming in from outside, and absolutely no furniture in the room other than the baby's basket. A mat with some sheets lay on the floor beside two or three neat piles of clothes and towels, and one or two filled plastic bags. A few bits of clothes hung drying in the window. I carefully pulled back the mosquito net a little to see William; he was sleeping. I tip toed-back out again.

Joan came back a moment later, while I stood in the kitchen door across the yard, watching the faint glow from within her room and breathing in the fresh smell of warm rain. She had an umbrella and was swinging a small plastic bag of food, looking somehow light and breezy, tripping in from the murky evening. She grinned at me and waved hello; when I asked if she'd got wet – gesturing wildly to explain – she laughed. In the evening light, darkened and gloomy with rain, I watched her wring out her dress around her ankles and use a wet cloth to quickly dry the floor inside where the rain had come in under the door. And then she swung the door closed behind her, and I heard her exclaim with gentle excitement as she bent down to the basket and her baby. She speaks Luganda, but the tone of tenderness with which she talked and cooed to her newborn baby was universally unmistakeable, and didn't need any explanation.