Being a widow can never be fun, so says Lara William who has been there for ten and a half years. She grew up in a home full of comfort and moved into a matrimonial home that also boasted a lot of comfort, love and understanding. Nothing prepared her mind for the shock that confronted her nine years later when she lost her pilot husband in a plane crash. It was an overwhelming tragedy, considering that her father had died only a year earlier. Friends stopped coming and life became so boring that she asked her mum, “Why didn’t you tell me that there is this side of life?” The beauty of it all is that she scaled the hurdles and tells PAUL UKPABIO why she now preoccupies herself with helping widows like her to feed and send their children to school.
After a lot of socialising, you seem to have completely gone off the social radar. What happened?
My husband died in 1993. Ordinarily, I am a strong person, but the incident left me devastated. That was when I realised that women are going through terrible things. I started thinking that life had to be better than it was; that widows ought to have a better deal. So I started what today is known as Widows Development Support Services. It started in a small way 10 years ago.
What were the challenges that you had?
It was the basic challenges faced by widows. When your husband dies, everything is like upside down. You suddenly realise that camps emerge all around you. Some of the camps will be for you while the others will not be. The camps will keep changing positions as it favours them. Fortunately for me then, I had good advisers around me.
I found it difficult understanding what was going on around me. My husband and I went to school together. I met him when I was 16. We were in school together, loved each other until we got married and had children together. I was married to him for nine years, but we had known each other much longer than that.
What is your background like?
I graduated from the University of Lagos. I studied Geography, did a masters degree in Guidance and Counselling. I have other certificates; one from a school in New York and so on. My late husband was a pilot. He worked with Aero Contractors and Bristow Helicopters.
What was marriage like for you?
It was fun. We were very good friends. We met at the A-level. I was at Methodist Girls Grammar School and from there to The Polytechnic Ibadan where I did my A-level. That was where we met.
While he worked as pilot, where were you working?
He didn’t want a working wife. He told me that. But at some point, I started a school. That is what I was doing when he died. I was running the school. It was when the school was at the stage of JSS I that he died.
How did you feel about his death?
It took me 10 years to accept that he was dead and gone forever. As a matter of fact, for the first five years, I kept on believing that he was at work somewhere. That is because he was used to travelling. He used to go to work for two weeks and the next two weeks he would be off. So it was easy to assume he was out there working. It was 10 years after that I finally closed my eyes to that.
Are there fond memories of him you wish to share?
My husband was a sociable person. I have two boys. I was actually five months pregnant for my husband when he died. That invariably means that the particular son in my womb then never met his dad alive! It is still amazing to me because that particular boy is his carbon copy. It is like he vomited the boy himself. His finger nails are like those of his late father. He has his father’s attitude, and he wants to fly like his dad. He has gone to university and has graduated, but he is still insisting that he wants to be a pilot like his late dad. Over time, the hurt will go, then you start asking yourself questions that would lead you somewhere.
What was your lifestyle like when he was around, and how has it been since he departed?
When my husband was around, I was a very comfortable woman. Immediately he died, the comfort disappeared and I had to learn a new way of life. Unfortunately for me, my father died a year before. Had it been that my father was alive when my husband died, I would have been well cushioned from the devastating loss. That is because I grew up very comfortable. We didn’t have any money issues in my father’s house. But here I was with the two men who meant everything to me gone! In fact, when my husband died, I saw a new phase of life and I had to confront my mother and tell her that she and my father lied to us; that they didn’t tell us or show us what true life looks like.
We were pampered from childhood. Nothing prepared me for hardship. I told her that they should have prepared us and let us know that there is another kind of life different from the one we knew. Our parents allowed us to live in a fairy tale world which I had to quickly come out of as a widow. More so when I had children I could not sit down and keep crying and expect other people to join in.
What did you do immediately afterwards?
I did a lot of things. I used to work. Then I started a bakery. But where I found comfort became helping widows like me. From there, the group grew and grew, and my pain started to diminish.
Does the widow initiative group you run have a future?
We can only get better. But what I would really like to say is that there should be a kind of national policy on widows. When I consider all the funds we are hearing that people have looted during the past administration, I wonder why some of these funds were not considered for addressing the plight of widows, even children or the society at large. We used to think that government could not afford it, but now we know that government can actually afford it but the money gets misappropriated and looted by a few. Why don’t we have widowhood allowances like they have in some countries abroad to cushion the initial change that widows are plunged into when their husband die?
What do you consider as the immediate needs of widows generally?
Most widows, when they initially arrive in our group, we give them forms to fill. We have a space where they are asked what they will like the government to do for widows. The options there are either accommodation, cash for business or education for children. And true to type, they do not ask for anything outside these three things. I will like to see government policy in that direction too. Agriculture is also an easy sector to place widows.
You advise young widows to remarry. Why haven’t you remarried?
At that time, I really didn’t know what I wanted. I was too busy trying to survive and get my children growing to think about another marriage.
Are you ready for marriage now?
Now I have three grandchildren. My younger son has just finished at the university and presently in the service to the motherland. He will soon be working. In fact, my children are now telling me to go and get married. I have time on my hand now. I can focus on somebody else now.
What kind of man would interest you?
(Laughs) I think most of my needs now will be in terms of companionship. I just need someone I can talk to; somebody I can laugh with. I really would just want someone I can talk to and go out with. Like I tell my friends, there are jokes you cannot share except with a husband, someone that is close. I need someone who is within my level as well.
Do widows still have fashion sense?
When one is a widow, there are things that just get lost immediately. One of them is fashion. Recently, we had a fashion day for our widows and we got clothes and make-up person with jewellers to come around. I remember a lady from Benin who said she could not remember the last time she wore make-up. Those things just get swallowed up with widowhood. Most widows feel that way; no time for beauty. As a matter of fact, I recognise widows who are having sexual affairs when they start wearing make-up and sharp dresses. I tell such widows, ‘You have started doing something.’ They laugh and say, ‘Mummy, how do you know?’ I advise them at that point to go and get married again. There is no need doing hide-and-seek game with sex. Go into marriage, stay in it and enjoy sex.
What essentially does your widow initiative do?
At Widows and Development Support Services, our primary focus is to work with widows and single mothers who live as if they are widows. We work with them to stabilise them. To achieve this, we look at four areas, the first being sustainable livelihood. We empower them to work and earn a living wage. That way, they can take care of themselves and their children. Secondly, we have what we call an educational support programme where we provide tuition scholarships for children of widows and for the widows themselves who may want to go back to school. Thirdly, we have access to health care for the widows and their children where we provide free healthcare services for our widows through an HMO provider. We do these for widows who are younger than sixty years, four children per family, not older than 21 years. And the last one is access to affordable shelter where we provide mortgage for widows so that they can have their own homes.
Do widows really come to you?
We started the initiative in 2003. Widows come when they are really down. We work more with widows who work with us; that is widows who come around and over time become stable and begin to earn good income. These are widows who have moved away from waiting for people to give them what to eat to the point where they are in charge of their livelihood and the maintenance of their children. If you come around and give them gifts, they can collect; but they do not beg for it. They have long moved away from that point of begging to live.
Any major projects you have been into?
There are several of them from the smaller groupings where widows just come in, we pray with them and they go away to more serious activities within four areas. Under our sustainable life programme, we have the Widows Activity Centre. During the monthly programme, we have created businesses where widows work and earn money and they go home buoyant. We supply them drinks. Cocacola has been one of our major sponsors for a long time. UAC foods too. We have worked with them also, and they give us products at distributor prices. These we give to the widows to pay at distributor prices and the profit is theirs. We have been doing that for about four years now. We also help in building markets for them. Our goal is to stabilise the widows, so that they do not continuously depend on the organisation. After a while, we cut the string so that we can give other widows a chance.
How many widows are on your list?
When we ended year 2014, we had about a thousand widows on our list. We are presently doing our annual review. By the time we are through, we will be able to know whether we had an increase or a decrease. But personally, I think we had an increase in the number of widows that have been coming around.
I am just wondering how you work with the widows independent of their children…
Oh, we work with the children too, especially in the area of education. If as a widow, your child can go to school, when you are older, that child will be there to take care of you, especially if the child is well balanced and well educated and controls a good personal income.
How about the emotional angle to helping widows?
For that, we have free counselling sessions for new widows whose husbands have just died. When they come, being fresh widows, we sit down with them and talk to encourage them. Most often, what they need most at that point is not just finance but also cushioning the the emotional effect of the loss. It is psychological. Every month, we have a prayer session where we meet to pray together. Also during our outreach programmes, we normally have a centre where we meet to pray with all widows. We use that opportunity to attend to those who have personal issues that may be spiritual. We encourage them to have one on one contact with the prayer warriors. At the end of the day, we have an opportunity to deal with all aspects of the personal lives of the widows; areas where they may need assistance to move on with life.
What is your personal concern in all this?
I know that in dealing with widows, each has a peculiar programme. It is never good to generalise. Some people come and they do not really need financial assistance. All they need is friends at that particular time. It could be because most of their friends disappeared when the man died as it is often the case. Or they have been abandoned by family and friends or perhaps they are going through the usual in-law crisis. So at that point, they just need someone who is like them to talk with, sit with and know that they are not alone in that situation. They want to be more or less reassured that they are not the only ones going through that situation of life.
There are those whose issue is about funding, and there are those whose issue is about children, that is the upbringing of the children. For instance, as a widow, when you talk to your child, you tell him or her to sit down here, but because he or she knows that the father is not there anymore, he or she may refuse to sit or take your command.
When do you advice that a widow should re-marry?
Once she has got over the grieving period. Here, there is a cultural issue over this matter where a woman stays forever with no husband because she has lost her spouse. Meanwhile, the widower can remarry. He actually easily becomes remarried faster than the widow. The men remarry within three months and they have sorted themselves out. The bible says that the covenant between you and a man is broken once he is dead. So a widow is free to remarry. However, for the social and cultural restrictions, it is only God that can give wisdom on how to go about overcoming it. Once a widow says she is remarrying, in some cultures, the other family comes around to collect things from her, and their excuse will be that she is going to marry another man. They may have a point because it is an emotional factor. For instance, I have a brother and as soon as he dies, the wife who has become a widow suddenly marries another man and he comes claiming ownership of his house. It is indeed emotional.
Shouldn’t widows have sexual partners?
I don’t think that a woman should go about saying she is a widow but having sexual partners, because body no be wood. I don’t agree with that. The bible says that if your body is burning for sex, go and marry. If a widow has problem with sex, she should go and marry. It is not a sin.
In that case, as a widow that you are, when is it right for a widow to get married?
It is when she is ready. For instance, if you had a bad marriage and the man dies, you do not expect that the woman will go and grieve for such a man. Of course, she will be thanking God that the man has gone (laughs) Such a person may decide to marry the following week! It is not her fault. You can’t blame her. But on the other hand, there are people who have known their husbands from childhood. Maybe they went to school together. So when the man dies, it is a difficult loss because they were best of friends. It will take some time for that person to come to that mental frame where she can start viewing another man as a replacement in that context.
But for other people, they are not emotional; they are looking at the economic issues that are before them: how they are going to take care of themselves or where children are involved, how they are going to take care of the children. At that point, they decide on remarriage. And for the much younger widows who perhaps are 19 years old, I think it is an opportunity to reorder their lives. They need to remarry as they are now much matured and find a life! They can go back to school even if they already have a child. We have widows who are just 28 years old.
How do you handle those younger widows?
Yes, when they arrive like that, crying at everything, I can tell them to grieve. It is allowed. But I tell them that at some point in time, the grieving must stop. They can’t continue like that. They have to remarry. Unfortunately, most widows do not remarry because of the social and cultural restrictions.
Again, for a woman, she may want to keep the memory of her late husband alive. For a man, it is not like the memory of the woman is not there, but a man can keep that somewhere. He could create a box somewhere in his mind or head and lock it up and get another woman. But for a woman, it is not like that. She sees the man in everything. She is still emotional.
And then there are the family issues. Like a widow was telling us the other day, her son wants to get married. She didn’t get along with her in-laws after the death of her husband, so she decided not to invite them to the wedding. She suddenly feels she has to hide it from them because she doesn’t know whether they will approve of the marriage or not. So those issues need wisdom. It is such issues that affect a widow. More importantly, most men want fresh girls to marry! A man will not readily take on a widow with attachments; that is children.
But have you had widows that remarried?
Yes, there have been. A widow remarried two years after she lost her husband. They have lived happily ever after. Another went through rough patches but few years later at her office, she met somebody through her boss and they have been married for three years now.
Do you find time for yourself?
Yes. Now it is different for me. Last year, I did a trip outside the country with friends. We went shopping in Dubai; things that I normally won’t think of.
Do you hope to come back to your glamorous state this new year?
I’m looking forward to it. New year, new wine, new wine-skin.
