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Mary Ondoru

Posted on by Stella Airoldi

Mary is with 22STARS since the beginning of October 2012. Mary speaks like most ladies only Swahili and Acholi and no English and she also has no phone or email address. Mary is one of our best designers because of her amazing ideas. She is a very caring woman who not only takes care of her own five children (22, 19, 17, 13 and 11 years old) but also raises three other ones by herself. Her children motivate her and encourage her to keep going in life. Two of her sons even help her in rolling the paper for the beads so she can make the designs. This is because Mary has a terrible bone desease she has so much pain in her wrists that she was not able any more to make beads. She had no money for medicine. So when we met her again in May 2015, we got her some medicine. She feels much better now and is happy that she can continue making beads. Besides he own health Mary struggles in raising money for school fees for her kids. Also she is very worried about the housing conditions in the Acholi Quarter. There is a lot of uncertainty of what is going to happen with the land, because of the national housing plan. She hopes that there will come money so they can get some land to build houses there. Mary is a single mom, her first husband died and she divorced her second husband. Since her parents were internally displaced from North to East Uganda, she never attended school and only speaks Swahili and Lugbara. Because there was no future for her in the village she moved to Kampala, where she started making jewellery out of paper. Mary is very proud to make jewellery for 22STARS and is happy that so many people love her work. She is grateful for our help and says that even though people from Europe look different from Uganda people, God connected us. In the end we all live under the same stars and are one family.

 

Project Details:

Client: Mary Ondoru