Sweet Summer 2026 · Stories from Uganda
I Am a Powerful Woman
Filda Arach, northern Uganda
Her mother named her Arach Filda. Arach means “bad” — given to her at birth because of the hard circumstances into which she arrived. It was a name meant to mark her.
Filda was fifteen years old when LRA rebel soldiers came to her homestead and abducted her and other children.
The LRA’s primary tool of control was forcing abducted children to kill. It bound them to the army and separated them forever from the life they had known. When a friend from Filda’s homestead attempted to escape, the soldiers brought her back. They gave Filda an axe and a machete and forced her to kill her. “They forced me against my will,” she repeated over and over. “They would have killed me if I refused.”
While in captivity, Filda was forced to carry heavy loads as the army moved across the country. They were hungry. They drank dirty water. They were made to witness atrocities. She was taken as a child bride.
When she was finally rescued, the rebel soldiers followed her home.
They caught her and beat her 200 times with a machete. Then they gathered the small children in the village — among them, the seven children of her neighbor Grace — locked them in a hut, and set it on fire. They threw Filda — unconscious, believed to be dead — into the burning hut with the children. She lost her pregnancy. Neighbors pulled her from the flames before the fire consumed her. The children did not survive.
Filda and a friend who had also survived the fire fled together to a government IDP camp, where they received medical care for their wounds. The camps were dangerous places of their own. There was no food, no sanitation. She contracted HIV. She tried to dig in people’s gardens for small payment, but her mental health made steady work nearly impossible.
There were days, she says, when her family did not have a single meal.
The friend who had run with her from the flames — the woman who had also lost children that day, who had also survived what should not have been survivable — was Grace Oketta.
Two women from the same village. The same war. Parallel losses too heavy to name.
They endured it together.
Years passed. The camp eventually closed. Life after displacement was its own kind of hardship — Filda’s mental health continued to make work difficult, and the trauma of everything she had survived did not simply lift because the war was over.
Filda Arach
Life began coming back to her in 2022 — when she and Grace joined a Sweet Sleep CO•OP together. Sweet Sleep gave them business training, startup capital, a savings group, and a community of women who show up every week.
Filda received two goats. They reproduced. She took a loan and began selling produce. She rented land and farmed it — 300 kilograms of maize, 300 kilograms of soybeans, ten bags of peanuts. Today all ten children in her care are in school, and her family eats two meals a day.
The woman whose name meant “bad” now looks you in the eye and says, “I am a powerful woman.”
Filda and Grace, Sweet Sleep CO•OP members, northern Uganda
She built that truth alongside Grace Oketta — the same woman who ran from the same fire, survived the same camp, and sits in the same CO•OP circle today.
There are women across northern Uganda whose stories look like Filda’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.