Rabecca Mathew Fuli Moriku

Human rights have always been a part of my life. My father passed away when I was only two. My mother moved us to a refugee camp in Northern Uganda. She was my role model. She took care of us, she made sure we had food to eat, we went to school. She’s never been to school—she doesn’t even know how to write her name—but she was so passionate about sending us to school. She was also very active in community mobilization, especially in the local women’s organization. Every week, she would meet other women in the refugee camp to discuss issues affecting them. They used to think of activities where they can generate income to support their family. I learned a lot from her.

When I reached secondary school, I got a scholarship and was named a “Girl Child Ambassador.” I got involved with an organization called Health of Adolescent Refugee Program. I used to go with the project staff from one refugee camp to the next to talk to girls and their mothers about the importance of staying in school. I did that throughout high school.

I like everything about HRAP. The classes, networking, mentoring and workshops have been amazing. There’s nothing I don’t like. It’s important for me to transfer what I learned in HRAP to every single work that I do in the future, whether it be to an international organization, a community-based organization or my informal work. What I learned here really is valuable. It has added a lot of width and depth to my understanding. The transitional justice course at Columbia Law School has given me a deep understanding of what it means to prosecute, give amnesties, set up a truth commission, forgive, reconcile, and repatriate. Thanks to the knowledge I gained from my gender mainstreaming class, I am able to look at all the tools and mechanism for transitional justice from a gender lens. Thanks to Issues in Rural Development and Human Rights and Development Policy, I now understand what it means to have a rights-based approach to development and a people-centered kind of intervention. I also look forward to integrating oral history and historical dialogue to conflict-transformation programming as I found the tools from the Politics of History and Reconciliation class to be very useful.