"So-and-So's Daughter"
Beatrice's Journey from Magola to Magalene
I was born to love people. I saw it first in my own mother, back in our village of Magola in Uganda, a woman who delivered babies without a tremor in her hands, who never once gossiped, who would not let a husband raise a hand to his wife without answering to her for it. She gave without ever expecting anything back, and somewhere in me, watching her, a very particular thought took root: I would be more than my mother. Not instead of her. More than her, the way a second chapter builds on the first.
We did not grow up with much. My father sold what little land he owned so my brothers could go to school. We relied on my mother's family's land to grow our own food. I never had proper sanitary products through all my years of schooling — we used whatever could be found and in our culture, a girl's period was something only an auntie was allowed to discuss. If you had no auntie nearby when it happened, it could turn your whole world upside down. I decided, even as a girl, that the story I had been born into did not have to be the only story I would ever tell.
In January 1990, I left Uganda for England with my two young children, Faith and Mark. I remember the anxiety underneath the hope on that flight ‘suppose I am sent back, suppose this does not work’ and I remember, just as clearly, telling myself that this was the beginning of breaking a cycle of struggle that had followed my family for as long as I could remember. It did not happen easily. I was handed a run-down house with no bed, no blanket, no chair, and told, essentially, to manage it. What carried me through those years was my faith, the practical kindness of my church community, and a resilience I did not know I had until I needed it.
Along the way, my family grew far beyond blood. We fostered twenty-seven children over the years, and I never once let myself love the children who came to us by law any less than the ones who came to us by birth. Watching a frightened new arrival find their footing in our home, a baby girl straight from the hospital, a boy from Afghanistan, children carrying grief they had no interest in explaining to anyone. I recognised something of my own arrival in England in every one of them. Fostering taught me how much dignity and belonging can come from something as ordinary as a family dinner table.
Eventually, that same pull toward giving led me back to my own community in Uganda. I began gathering the women of my village together, and I will tell you honestly. I went in believing I had something to give them. I came away understanding that they were never short on skill. They were short on opportunity. We started what we called village learning, women teaching women, and I still have the photograph of a woman of ninety years old holding up a piece of paper on which she had written her own name for the very first time in her life.
That work led directly to the cause closest to my heart: making sure no girl ever has to feel the shame I once felt. We taught girls and boys together about periods, involved parents in that teaching, and then went further — building the first purpose-built changing rooms in local schools, with somewhere to wash, somewhere to dry a pad, somewhere to change with dignity, where before there had only been a spare office. Absenteeism dropped. Girls who might otherwise have left school stayed. Some have gone on to learn how to make their own pads and carry that skill back into their own communities.
I did not build any of this to be remembered. But I will tell you something I have never said publicly before: in that village, people no longer know me by my own name. They know me only as so-and-so's daughter. Every gift that reaches an old villager becomes, in that moment, praise directed straight back at my own parents — two people who, I believe, died thinking they had achieved very little. They were wrong. The small seeds they planted in me became this.
My dream for Magdalene is bigger than where we stand today. We currently work in one district. I want us to become a name spoken of well beyond it, a model the Ugandan government itself adopts, so that every primary school in the country has a changing room, emergency pads, and proper education for every girl who needs it. We are only the beginning of it. I want someone else to finish what we started.
If you take one thing from my story, let it be this: every act of real change still has to start with one person, giving what they have, even when it is small. I gave what I had. I am only grateful I have lived long enough to watch it grow into something larger than I ever quite dared to dream.