Please take a moment to read through this wonderful example of a My Story submission, from our first My Story submission process on the topic of Land:

After we were orphaned, my sister and I were denied the right to inherit my father's property. I remember one evening when we were evicted mercilessly from my father’s house in Nairobi. My paternal uncles claimed they had rightful ownership, and that we should forget about anything left behind by our parents. In their words, “He was your father but he was our brother.” They greedily—and legally—accumulated all of the property for themselves.

Upon the death of a husband or father, many female-headed households are displaced from matrimonial and ancestral land. Because children’s rights are linked to the mother, and there is no law protecting widows and orphans, many female-headed households lose property and inheritances to relatives. Like ferocious beasts waiting to grab their prey, relatives develop wait to grab anything in sight when they learn that one is infected with HIV. After all, the sentence of HIV/AIDS is well known to be death. Girls are particularly denied the right to inherit because it is assumed that they shall marry elsewhere and transfer inherited property to other clans.

It is time now for governments, organizations, men, and women of goodwill to cut the root of misery and devastation this pandemic causes on children. Let us find a cure for HIV/AIDS. Let us give children whose parents fall victim to HIV/AIDS, the right to live in dignity.

mamaAfrica, Kenya.