If tears could bring some one an education, Elizabeth Mbabazi would be in school now. Mbabazi 17, finished her senior four last year, but she has failed to get money to continue to A’ level. “She cries and cries everyday. I have told her I can’t raise any money to take her back to school. Now she has finished two days without eating. I don’t know what to do,” says Winfred Kamitumba, Mbabazi’s mother.

Mbabazi in middle and her mother on right

Mbabazi says she doesn’t know whether to be annoyed or not with her mother, because she knows the mother has been struggling single-handedly to raise her fees, plus her brother and sister and to look after them.  “What pains me is that all my former classmates have gone back to school and me I can’t. I know my mum doesn’t have money, but I badly need to study,” Mbabazi says before breaking into tears.
Kamitumba who works as a cleaner in Kabanyolo, an agricultural extension institute of Makerere University says her worsening diabetes has thrown away her dream of educating her three kids despite more than 10 years of her courageous efforts to look after and educate them. “ I have tried but now I have failed. I earn one hundred and fourty thousand shillings (shs140, 000=). I use 90,000 to rent the house we stay in, and the rest for treatment since I’m a diabetic person and for home care,” she says.

Because of these problems, Kamitumba says she can no longer borrow from FINCA and PRIDE micro-finance institutions where she has been getting money to do small scale business since she can’t pay back. “I used to sell clothes in Balikudembe market, but since my health worsened, I can’t. I had managed to take my daughter to Mengo S.S paying 240,000= per term where she scored 18. I would have risked to take her back, but the headmistress who used to allow me pay in installments was transferred,” Kamitumba says. She says family life has become bad because the daughter keeps crying for education.

“If I don’t get help, this girls can not go back to school. Her sister has joined senior one after someone offered to help me. I had to tell the boy to leave school,” she says. This is Kamitumba’s nightmare of single motherhood, worsened by disease and poor pay.

Meanwhile, Mbabazi says she is trying to use all the time she can avoid crying to knit decorations and think about a future that almost ended with her senior four. That is unless a miracle brings her school fees and she is able to go back to school.