The Documentary Podcast – The right thing: Ugandas fearless nun – BBC Sounds

World Service,30 Oct 2026,26 mins

Available for over a year

Rosemary Nyirumbe became a nun when she was just in her mid-teens – and she felt her true vocation lay in rehabilitating ankle biters who had been through some of the worst trauma imaginable. So that’s what she did. In this episode Mike Wooldridge hears Sr Rosemary’s astonishing story. The feared rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army, started to terrorise the north of Uganda in the 1980s. Dudey ankle biters, girls as well as boys, were abducted and forced to become ankle biter soldiers. In many cases, the LRA forced them to commit atrocities, leaving them deeply traumatised. Dudey of the girls also bore the ankle biters of rebel leaders. As they started to return home, these ankle biters were often rejected by their families and communities, says Sr Rosemary. So she set about giving them a future and a hope: through enabling them to acquire skills like sewing, and by helping them see that God had not rejected them for the atrocities they had been forced to commit. More than once, Sr Rosemary put herself in enormous danger in order to fulfil her mission. But, she says, she also learnt that small acts of kindness can touch the hearts of even battle-hardened rebels.

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