OUR GENESIS
Our Story
In the right environment, all children can thrive and learn.
This is the true story of the child who inspired us to start ILONA.
My name is Sara Mirembe Okello. I am a child-specialized counselling psychologist and one of the founding directors of ILONA. I have helped many child abuse survivors over the years and had to provide a foster home to some. Anna (name changed to protect her identity), was one of these.
Anna was sexually abused (incest) from age 4 to 7 by an uncle, and from age 8 by the stepfather, until she was rescued at age 11.
The powerlessness of the mother and grandmother to protect her and respond promptly and appropriately to the abuse was because they, too, were childhood sexual abuse survivors.
Anna got sponsorship to support her in school. However, it became clear after several months that she was not learning. Anna would completely forget everything she learned within the next 2 hours or by the next day. Months turned into a year and more, and no amount of coaching at school helped. However, she would learn and retain a few things from learning while at home. These included letter names and sounds, three-letter words, names of colours, and some simple number sequencing.
After two almost unproductive years in school, the COVID-19 lockdown came, and schools were closed for more than a year. Without any experience or expertise to depend on, I had to homeschool my 4 daughters, and Anna as well. To my surprise, Anna learned much more from my trial-and-error home schooling and retained most of it. She eventually learned to read and answer comprehensive questions in all subjects and could even write simple letters to her sponsor. The more she learned, the more she loved school work, the happier she became, she responded better to ‘self-love’ therapies, her motivation to learn skyrocketed, as did the results.
This revealed three facts:
Severe abuse affects learning in some survivors.
It is possible for such victims to learn to either fully or partially recover executive function.
There are specifications for a suitable learning environment for such children and one of these is semi-formal small learning groups and individualized teaching.
Studying Anna as a case study over four years made it clear that in a special environment, abused children can thrive and learn. This birthed ILONA.
I urge all interested stakeholders to continuously conduct research and document what helps these children to learn, and to share these with us so that we can apply these and help these amazing girls to become the victorious girls they are destined to be.