Owalai, Uganda – Martha Apolot navigates a dusty road through fields of cassava and millet under the scorching sun. He carries a hoe on one shoulder, the blade carefully balanced, and on the other, his eight-year-old son Aaron.
Every day, the 21-year-old mother takes Aaron to the field where she works.
“Aaron is very weak, so I have to get him out of the house and put him to bed somewhere so I can work,” Martha says quietly, holding Aaron on her lap as she sits on the bare dirt inside her small, one-room hut in Owalai, a rural village in eastern Uganda.
They return home when it is time to feed Aaron or when he has gotten dirty, not when the plowing is over.
Aaron has an undiagnosed disability. You cannot walk, talk, eat solid foods, or hold your head up without support. The back of his head is going bald from lying down and is prone to sores. He needs constant care, but Martha has no one else to take care of him while she works.
Martha was 13 years old when a man took her from the school yard and raped her. She didn't know the man and never saw him again, she says. Her memories of that day are traumatic and she remains silent, breathing deeply and looking up at the sky.
Her pregnancy created an immediate rift within her family.
“My dad didn't want me to come home, but my mother begged my father to [let me] Stay,” he explains after a long pause.
Martha, the seventh of eight siblings, ran away and spent months at friends' houses. Finally, her older brother Paul, with whom she is close, tracked her down and told her that her parents had accepted the situation and that she could return home.
Aaron's birth was long and complicated. After 15 hours of labor, doctors at the Soroti city hospital admitted the teenager for an emergency cesarean section.
Martha remembers the love she felt when she first saw her baby. “It felt very good to receive my son. He was so handsome,” she remembers.
But Aaron was given oxygen shortly after birth. When they took him away, she thought he had died. While she spent the first week of her life on oxygen, doctors warned Martha of future complications.
