Life has been tough for Santa Otyeka, a subsistence farmer living in Northern Uganda. Since the death of her husband in 2002, she has relied on the land that her husband left behind to fend for and sustain her children and other dependents. Although it hasn’t been easy, she has managed to support her family by growing beans, cassava, maize and vegetables, and grazing livestock for milk production on the land in Owele East Village in Pader District.
Life for Santa and her children would have been less of a challenge if she didn’t have to live in constant fear as she struggled to protect her major source of livelihood: her land. Six years after her husband died, her brothers-in-law returned from the internally displaced camps where they had lived for several years, uprooted by the brutal civil war with the Lord’s Resistance Army that devasted northern Uganda. Little by little, Santa’s in-laws fenced off and occupied portions of her land until finally they forced her off altogether, claiming she had no rights to the land in their Acholi culture. It is because of women like Santa that we are starting Stand For Her Land in Uganda.
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