The Right Thing: Uganda’s fearless nun 2/2

Rosemary Nyirumbe became a nun when she was just in her mid-teens – and she felt her true vocation lay in rehabilitating children who had been through some of the worst trauma imaginable.

So that’s what she did. In this edition of his occasional series, The Right Thing, Mike Wooldridge hears Sr Rosemary’s astonishing story.

The feared rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army, started to terrorize the north of Uganda in the 1980s. Many children, girls as well as boys, were abducted and forced to become child soldiers. In many cases, the LRA forced them to commit atrocities, leaving them deeply traumatized. Many of the girls also bore the children of rebel leaders.

As they started to return home, these children were often rejected by their families and communities, says Sr Rosemary. So she set about giving them a future and a hope: through enabling them to acquire skills like sewing, and by helping them see that God had not rejected them for the atrocities they had been forced to commit.

More than once, Sr Rosemary put herself in enormous danger in order to fulfil her mission. But, she says, she also learnt that small acts of kindness can touch the hearts of even battle-hardened rebels.