Sister Rosemary arrives at a tailoring school. She doesn’t know how to sew.

Rosemary is a Ugandan religious sister of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In northern Uganda, the conflict with the Lord’s Resistance Army had upended many families’ lives. Some of the students she met in Gulu had been abducted by the rebels. She found this out at school, by listening to them. She also found out how little even a good programme can do if it takes no account of what stops a girl from sitting down in class or staying until the end of a lesson.

An invitation on the radio

Rosemary told Georgetown that the following year she put out an announcement on the radio. Girls who had returned from captivity and wanted to study were invited to St Monica’s. They could come if they were pregnant. If they had children, they could bring them along.

What stays with you is what happened next. The girls came with their children. While their mothers were in class, someone needed to look after them. Rosemary says she hadn’t thought that part through. She hired a woman and started a childcare group under a tree, then hired a second person. In time, she recalls, that first attempt was followed by spaces set aside for childcare and early education.

There’s a difference between telling a girl she can study and making it possible for her to do so. The second takes someone to look after her child while she learns, somewhere to leave them and the peace of mind of knowing she can go and pick them up. It’s easy to miss that part if you tell the story only as one of a courageous announcement. The work begins when the people who hear the invitation take it seriously.

The uniform the girls didn’t want

There was something else Rosemary understood because the students told her. She had had a house built for young mothers and their children. The girls let her know that being housed separately made them feel the others saw them only as mothers. A different uniform made them easy to pick out straight away. Rosemary had thought she was doing something useful for them. In the interview she remembers how surprised she was to learn what it had actually felt like.

She changed the uniform and gave them the option of moving into the dormitory with the other students. As she tells it, they all chose to move. That detail tells us more than a long description of the school could: the girls could say what wasn’t working, and what they said changed a decision about their own lives.

There was still a place for their children. The students could also share in the life of the other girls, with the same uniform and the same spaces. Reading this part, you think of how often a solution can look perfect to the person who arranged it. The person who wears that uniform every day knows what it feels like to walk into class marked out in a way she didn’t choose.

A school that learns from its students

At Gulu, even the way people lived together at school was something they had to learn.

Rosemary’s story shows a woman who can make a hard decision and who can go back and change it. The second part is easier to miss. Once the house was built and everything had been organised, it would have been understandable to want to defend the work already done. Instead, she tells us about the moment the girls explained that they would prefer something else.

Tailoring is still part of the story. Sewing Hope, the foundation that supports Rosemary’s work, describes sewing as one of the skills girls can learn alongside other practical activities. That’s why it’s worth going back to the beginning: the woman who couldn’t sew at first was facing girls who were looking for a way to keep learning. Sometimes that meant changing a lesson. Sometimes it meant reorganising an entire day.

Faith enters the story in the reason Rosemary gives for choosing her congregation. She had been struck by how the sisters cared for vulnerable people, especially children. In Gulu that choice took very practical forms. A tailoring lesson. Someone to look after the little ones. The same uniform as your classmates. The story begins with a sister teaching herself to sew. The part that stays with you comes when she starts learning from the girls who came there to study.