Rose

We are sitting, Adharanand, Ossian, Uma and I, on a small sofa in a dim room. Light is pushing in at the open doorway behind us, and from a window on the wall by the door, but the back of the room remains in shadow. Opposite our sofa, in touching distance, is a bunk bed, the top bunk missing, broken. A mattress is rolled up in the corner under the window. In the shadows, a water tank, gas cooker, some bundles. Overhead, an energy saving light bulb. A stool, covered with a cloth, acts as a table, an old sweatshirt is a doormat. We are at the home of Rose and her four children, Mark, Joseph, Jasmine and Natasha.

We first met Rose on an old school bus, driving to the start of the women's race organised by the Iten town council. She squeezed through the crowd waiting to board the bus, climbing on behind us, and sitting down on the empty seat next to me. Little, slight, with a shy smile, she told us she was in training as an athlete, despite an injury to her left hip that caused her to limp slightly.

The bus pulled up at the start of the race and the engine stopped. All the passengers leapt up from their seats and started pulling off their clothes, stripping down to lycra pants and vests. Excited, chatting, they sprinted off the bus and over to a lone shed in the corner of a field, the loo. Before the last of them had managed to get off the bus, the race organisers were calling for the race to start, and within seconds they were off, disappearing down the road we had just driven along, Rose struggling along near the back.

Rose gets up before 5 o'clock every morning to go for a morning run with her training partner, a Ugandan lady called Jen who runs for the Ugandan national team, leaving her children sleeping at home. Her husband has left her. Jen is talking now, sitting on Rose's broken bunk bed, answering my question about how things are now in Uganda. There have just been peaceful elections for the first time in many years. She tells us that people have had enough of the fighting, especially the women. When there is fighting, she says it's the women who suffer the most. The men simply run away, but the women cannot leave their children, and cannot run carrying them. There are women in Uganda with no eyes, others with no breasts, or no nose, no ears, sometimes no mouth. Cut off during the fighting.

We sit drinking milky tea and eating slices of white bread. Rose's daughters fall asleep on the bottom bunk. They are not well, a fever. They came round to visit us the other day, sitting quietly on the sofa in our sitting room staring at Lila and Uma. They do not speak English, most people learn English in school, and Lila and Uma know only a few words in Swahili. They played with the dolls for a while, then all went outside to play catch with a ball. Rose told us she had no food at home that day, that they had only had tea to drink for the last two days.

Rose's home is in a courtyard made up of identical, single-room dwellings. Cloth's hang over the doorways, women come in and out, slow and busy. One is washing the dishes in a bucket outside, another washes clothes and hangs them up to dry. In the centre of the grassy courtyard is a water pump, below it a muddy ditch, a makeshift swing, sheep, rubbish. It is raining gently, above us a rainbow.

Uma is delighted with the swing, made from a wooden frame with a loop of rope. Mark lowers if for her, he speaks English well. Ossian is delighted with the sheep. He trots after them, throwing stones and laughing. Now Uma is jumping back and forth over the muddy ditch, a group of small children watching her with surprise. One of her shoes falls off and gets covered in mud. Mark pumps some water from the well and cleans it for her.

We finish our tea and step outside to say goodbye. The children are playing with a football. By the front door stands a collection of old containers and tubs. Rose has planted flowers in them, "I love flowers" she tells me. We walk home at dusk, kerosine lamps lit in the shops, the streets busy, bustling still. Uma is chatting away, "Was Mark the first born?", "And who was the second born?", "Mummy, don't tell Lila about the swing, I want to tell her first". A choir is singing in the little park, a crowd has gathered to listen. We arrive home in the dark.