- Erratic weather and the collapse of traditional farming in Kotido have triggered a surge in depression and anxiety.
- Severe food scarcity is driving a wave of abandonment, leaving women to face the weight of suicidal thoughts and household survival alone.
- Market prices for staples have doubled, forcing families into a survival gamble between eating their remaining seeds or foraging for wild weeds.
- Community-based group therapy sessions held under shade trees are providing a refuge for women to process grief and find collective hope.
This story by Hellen Kabahukya was supported by the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship. Other contributors include: Prossy Nakomol for Transcriptions, Jeremiah Mukiibi for Photography, Kifunga Specioza Nawal for Research, and Translations.
In Kanawat village, women meet once a week to share the pressures of life under this shade with the help of mental health experts from Strong Minds Uganda.
Beneath the wide branches of a shade tree in Kanawat-Kotido district, a group of women sit in a circle. They gather here every week for an hour, meeting not just as neighbours but as people who have overcome loss and grief. For many, this tree has become more than a shelter from the scorching sun; it is a refuge for healing.
The women who sit here carry heavy burdens. Some are depressed, anxious, or suicidal, and many suffer from all three. Their stories differ, yet they are bound by the same invisible thread–loss brought on by a changing climate and the collapse of their farmlands.
For over 6 weeks, they return to this circle, here, under the tree, to find shelter from the sun and refuge for their minds.
What’s your burden?
At the start of each session, community facilitator Lomala Agnes asks her group members to share how they feel. Using a pictorial scale of a woman carrying different loads, they each point at how heavy their burdens feel. As I listen in, their answers reveal lives fractured by hunger and abandonment.
A mother explains that her children left home in search of food. A wife recalls how her husband abandoned her for another household that still had harvests. A 17-year-old girl, while carrying a child barely 8 months old, describes how she became a mother too soon, believing it was her only escape from hunger.
The sister who has lost her childhood because she has to work odd jobs to sustain her family, A widow, her voice cracking, shares how she lost both her husband and her cattle to the drought.
One by one, the women lay down their grief, and yet it all comes down to one thing.
This land has betrayed them. It refuses to give back the seedling that it was given at the start of the season, the sky has turned its canvas against them, and the rains are late. Once again, like it has done many times, it has closed and refuses to give them hope.
Achii’s breaking point
Achii Rose, a farmer in Kotido West division and mother of four, was convinced to join this cycle’s session after the village rumour mill spread that she seemed troubled.
“My husband left with another woman because we had no food this season,” she says quietly. “I am stressed seeing my children wither from hunger, and still the rain has refused to come.” She tells the group.
Her troubles began quietly,
It started with a few beans sprouting, then they dried before they could fruit, then the granary dried. No seeds, no food, a failed past season, and a hopelessness for the ongoing season.
Like any other human with nothing to hope for, she did what everyone in her place would do: stress, worry and despair. She soon slipped into isolation.
It was quiet; she hoped it would go unnoticed. She cried in the dark and put on a brave face in the morning. Life was slowly eating her up, and she felt trapped, trapped by hopelessness, but in a community like hers, nothing goes unnoticed. As luck would have it, the village gossip worked in her favour, the questions of her well-being struck the curiosity of Lomala, who made the decision that now has turned Achii’s life around–hopefully for the better.
“She kept to herself,” recalls facilitator Lomala. “Here, we are a communal people, so when someone withdraws, we know something is wrong.”
After a little persuasion, she accepted the invitation to join a therapy group that meets once a week for an hour. With nothing more to lose, Achii agreed, and now, in her second week, she sits beneath the tree listening closely. Her pain is still raw, but she no longer carries it alone.
With 5 mouths to feed, abandoned, and withdrawn, Achii was diagnosed with depression as a result of a life change. This diagnosis was established by a mental health officer attached to Strong Minds Uganda, the organisation under which the therapy group is undertaken.
She tells us what broke her, the drought. It had brought more than hunger; it had destroyed every pillar she could stand on— the worst was taking her marriage.
“My husband’s abandonment in favour of the first wife was my breaking point. I had stayed strong till he walked away, opting to join the other wife whose situation was not as dire as mine. He called me lazy and all other manner of insults,” Achii sighs, holding back tears.
The land betrayed them
All around Kotido, the evidence of the dry spell is unmistakable. The seasonal rivers have dried into sand, and the soil is cracked and stubborn. The people remember when rains came faithfully each March all through to August, but now they arrive late, sometimes not at all, or in sudden floods that wash away seedlings.
“It is May, rain should have started by now, but see all around, it is dry. When we thought the rains had started, we rushed to plant, and then just like that, we lost all our seeds. The rain just teased us for a few days in April,” Lochoro Elizabeth explains as she takes us around Kanawat.
With seasonal rivers dry, people, especially children tasked with the job of fetching water, have to walk long distances to get it.
The water is shared between humans and animals as it is scarce. Water pools scattered around the district carry soiled water, and yet still people utilise it for all its functions.
“We use ash to separate the dirt from the water. When the soil settles down, we sieve out the clean water to use,” A young boy explains as he fetches water from one of the pools.
Boreholes and national water were nowhere in sight, although district officers insist that they are spread across the district.
The markets tell a more horrific story.
On a weekly market day in Kanawat, a space that should be filled with thousands of people and their goods, looks empty. In better years, the market would spill over with sorghum, millet, beans, groundnuts, fresh vegetables, wild fruits, and rows of cattle, goats, and chickens.
Now, most of that has vanished. A handful of grain sellers guard small piles of beans and sorghum, often imported from Acholi, and the few cattle tethered in the heat draw little attention.
The once-bustling marketplace has become a skeleton of itself, stripped down to scarcity, where even traders admit they come more out of habit than hope.
“Most of the grain comes from outside Kotido,” explains a collections officer at the municipality. “The locals have nothing to sell. Many are in their gardens, hoping the rains come soon. But hope alone doesn’t fill an empty stomach.”
Even for those preparing their fields, the land resists. Hard, dry, and unyielding, it takes the strength of oxen to break it. Farmers press on, praying for clouds, though the skies remain stubbornly clear.
Seedling or food, choose your poison.
“These beans I bought at the beginning of the year,” one woman explains, sitting beside her pile. “I planted some, but they died. I kept the rest, waiting for rain that has not yet come.”
Now she sells them at double the usual price. It is not just food she is trading, but the last of her seed.
She is not the only one; most traders in the market bought earlier and hoarded in anticipation of the drought, and now, if anyone wants seeds or food, they have to part with twice or thrice the usual market price.
The granaries, a traditional storage method that once held reserves for lean seasons, now stand empty. The residents have to endure inflated prices, while their own gardens lie barren. With no seeds left to plant, each season begins with loss already written in it.
For women already struggling to keep their families fed, the uncertainty of the land deepens both their hunger and their despair because, whether they choose to plant or eat, the future feels like it has already been stolen.
When cattle leave
Beyond the markets, pastoralists lead their herds across vast stretches of the semi-arid savannah, searching for water sources scattered miles apart and pasture barely able to feed them.
The men leaving with the herd has become a cycle of absence. They travel hundreds of kilometres to other districts, sometimes crossing into Kenya or South Sudan, chasing shrinking grasslands. Some return after months, others after years. Some never come back.
“You can spend months, sometimes a year, without seeing your husband,” one woman explains. “They go far with the cattle, and you don’t know if they are alive or dead.”
At the kraals where men camp with their cattle, life is stripped to survival. Food is scarce, violence is common, and raiding is both a threat and a temptation. Young men, once raised to be protectors, now face constant risk of ambush, disease, and despair.
Cattle are not only wealth in Karamoja, but they are also identity, survival, and pride. When one’s herd dies, families unravel.
“When the cows die, the men feel they die too,” explains Loyang Aryet, “Without cattle, there is no dowry, no respect, no manhood. Many return broken, ashamed, turning to alcohol or abandoning their homes altogether.”
The burden then doubles for women who are left behind to raise children, manage empty fields, and endure stigma when husbands do not return.
The men, too, are caught in silence, unable to voice their pain in a culture where vulnerability is seen as weakness.
The sky has mood swings between floods and drought.
In Kamor, 24 kilometres from Kotido West Division, a farmer shows us her flood-affected garden that came in April— her seedlings ruined. Months later, the same fields lie parched and cracked, barely holding the little that’s left.
The contradictions of climate change are cruel. When the rain comes as expected, it sometimes sweeps through too violently, turning small gardens into rivers of mud. The seedlings, buried and drowned. Weeks later, the same plots crack under relentless heat.
For women left home to tend to the home, each season is a gamble. The granaries are empty. The fields are unpredictable. The remnant seed gone with the hope, leaving a hollow emptiness of stress, despair, and anxiety.
To survive, women forage for survival, gathering amaranthus, bitter leaves, and firewood. Some sell what they collect for a few shillings to buy basics. Others drink cheap alcohol to dull the ache of an empty stomach. Each day is a battle between necessity and exhaustion, hope and resignation.
“I pick dodo (amaranthus) and bitter leaves,” one woman says, balancing her bundle. “Sometimes we eat it, other days I sell it to afford basics like salt, food is scarce.”
Withered and sun-beaten the vegetables make it to the market, and yet still sometimes they are not bought fast enough.
Firewood is also foraged to be sold for as low as 2000 Uganda shillings. The firewood is often picked up from bushes and gardens as people dig, piling up enough for personal use and sell.
Sadly, to achieve this, many children are pulled from child-like activities to assist their parents in foraging and gardening— a training that is crucial for survival in Karamoja. While the boys tend to the cows, the girls are in the gardens with no regard to their desires, dreams, and hopes.
A lost childhood, forgotten dreams, and a life lived in survival. Many people are left with no choice but to deal with the cards that the climate throws at them, in whatever mood it comes in.
A Community Solution
They learn to recognise symptoms of depression, share coping strategies, and support each other beyond the sessions.
In Kanawat, these women return week after week to sit under the shade of the tree. They come burdened with grief, with empty hands, with empty granaries. But in speaking, in listening, in naming their despair, they begin to reclaim part of their lives.
“In this group, we remind each other that we are not alone,” says Lomala. “We cry together, but we also laugh together.”
