I was his lover at night and sister during day

Struggling to breastfeed her malnourished set of twins, Patricia Kakayi can't hold back her tears as she narrates her ordeal.

The 22-year-old mother says it all began when she got pregnant and the man responsible was not willing to support her.

"He went to Kampala looking for a job and I never heard from him again," she says.

Desperate and naive, Kakayi decided to leave Mbale, where she stayed, and travel to Kampala in the hope of reuniting with the father of her daughter or maybe get a job to make ends meet.

However, things did not turn out as expected because she landed in the hands of a despicable man called Fred, a security guard who promised her, as they say, heaven-on-earth.

Fred, Kakayi and her daughter lived at Namuwongo in a one-roomed house with a curtain in the middle to separate the sitting space from the sleeping area.

"Everything was fine until the beast in Fred came out. Every night he came and forced himself on me. When I resisted, he threatened to throw me out," she recalls.

Kakayi adds that Fred would introduce her as his sister and refused her to reveal to anyone that he used to have sexual intercourse with her.

And when she got pregnant, Fred told her to abort. She refused to take that path. As a result, Kakayi was forced to become the breadwinner because Fred had stopped looking after them.
 
"Given my condition, I had to wash people's clothes in order to put food on the table and save some money to cater for the hospital bills," she says.  

Kakayi says she gave birth to twins but Fred never showed up at the hospital. In fact, he even denied being the twins' father and threatened to run away.

"When I returned from the hospital, Fred had remarried," she recalls.

Today, Kakayi stays with a friend, together with her four-year-old daughter who is starting school next year and her one-year-old twin boys. 

She Kakayi earns about sh2,000 daily from selling food, which job she says she is soon losing because her boss claims it is making losses.