Sweet Summer 2026 · Stories from Uganda
She Is Still Alive
Grace Oketta with team member Kelly, northern Uganda
Grace Oketta was thirteen years old when her mother sent her to the market to buy salt. She never made it home.
Rebel soldiers abducted her on the road. Along with other girls, she was forced to march more than 100 miles on bare feet, carrying heavy loads until her legs swelled. They were told that anyone who tried to escape would be killed. When one of Grace’s friends attempted to flee, the soldiers brought her back and killed her in front of the others. Then they took the girl’s blood and rubbed it on Grace’s nose — so she would understand what escape cost.
Later, Grace and three others were accused of trying to escape while they were fetching water to tend to wounded rebel soldiers. Grace was given 100 lashes with a stick. Immediately after the beating, she was forced to carry ammunition. If you slowed down, they beat you. If you couldn’t walk, they beat you and then killed you.
“Even now I still feel that trauma. I feel the pain in my chest as I tell you this story. I cannot carry heavy luggage because the trauma is still there. My life has never been the same from what I experienced.”
Grace eventually escaped — not through a plan, but through circumstance. She wandered into a neighboring village while gathering firewood and someone recognized her. Her family had believed she was surely dead. And when she returned, some were afraid of her — afraid of what the rebels had made her do. She was sent for rehabilitation, and slowly began to rebuild.
She married and had seven children. Her husband did not know she had been in captivity. For a time, it seemed that the worst was behind her.
And then the rebels came again.
They came to the village where Grace lived with her family. They found her seven children and locked them inside a hut. They threw a neighbor woman — beaten unconscious and left for dead — in with them, and set the hut on fire. Grace was pregnant with their eighth child. The soldiers beat her so severely that she lost the baby. Then they locked her in another hut, away from her children. Neighbors pulled the unconscious woman from the flames. Grace’s seven children did not survive.
She was not alone in her grief. A woman from her village — a neighbor who had survived her own version of that same fire — lost a child that day too. Together, the two of them fled to an IDP camp, carrying what was left.
Grace sharing her story
Grace found her way to Sweet Sleep, and to Christ. Today she is raising the children in her care. One of them is now in secondary school in Kampala. Grace is paying the tuition.
“I know somehow,” she told us, “we will break the cycle of poverty here. Because with education there is a difference in your life, and that’s the difference I’m seeing in my life.”
Grace credits Sweet Sleep with bringing her to faith. “I have a relationship with Christ,” she said. “And I know that God is alive. If He were not alive, I would not be alive as well.”
Grace (pink and purple) and Filda (black shirt) at their Sweet Sleep CO•OP
Grace cannot read the Bible her grandchildren read to her — but she is the reason they can, and she is the reason they do.
Grace Oketta, visited by Sweet Sleep staff
There are women across northern Uganda whose stories look like Grace’s — war, loss, survival, and now the quiet rebuilding of something worth leaving behind. Sweet Sleep’s Sweet Summer 2026 campaign is raising $110,000 to launch CO•OPs for women like her. Your gift makes that possible.