"Their Lives Have Been Robbed from Them"

Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe was on Charlie Rose last night, and just as her artfully piped red habit suggested that she was not the usual guest, the conversation was not the usual conversation.

Her account of her work with girls abducted and made child soldiers – sex slaves – in Joseph Kony’s army in Uganda suggested that she is a cross between Robin Hood and Mother Teresa. Through abduction, she told Rose, “their lives have been robbed from them.” She tries to give them their lives back.

She does this in two ways. One is frankly by “mothering” them. Many of the girls are now young mothers, but they cannot love their children unless they are given love themselves. So the female religious known as a sister becomes a mother.

The other is by “marrying” them afresh. Not to other men, though. Those marriages will pass. So she aims to teach them a skill and urges them to “marry” that skill, because a particular skill will be a young woman’s future.

It’s striking – and dismaying – that it takes the coicidence of a Time 100 citation for Sister Rosemary and an awful episode of sex slavery in Nigeria (one addressed by President Obama) for Sister Rosemary’s life’s work to be on the American agenda. But that’s how things work in this broken world. It’s a good thing that it does work some of the time.

• 9 May 2014
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