Tuesday, 6 November 2012

Posted by Sibon Phiri on 04:45 No comments



As promised, some of my friends who are domestic violence survivors will be sharing their experience here. Here is the first one.

"My name is Ana. I got married at a very young age and soon after being married I found out I was expecting a baby. Things were going very well at first but as time went by my husband started hanging out with the wrong crowd. It got to the point where he started doing drugs and so on. One night he was hanging out with his ‘so called friends’ and got blamed for a crime he didn't do, which he got into trouble for. By this time, I was already 6 months along in my pregnancy. As time went by my husband said he no longer wanted us to be married. Because of all the problems we were going through and I was tired of trying to sort him out and putting up with his addiction to drugs and alcohol, we decided to divorce.

I had the baby on my own with a lot of struggles but I was OK with that as I did not have the stress of not knowing if my husband would make it home at night. I was a single mom for a year and half and I was working in a really good job. My son at the time was almost 2 and I met someone who also worked at the same place. We both had been married, I was a divorcee and he was widow man at 32 with 3 young children.

We dated for a while and things were going great. We both knew what we wanted for both our families and we decided to move in together with the children. We all got along very well. My step daughter at the time was only 5 years old and she really needed a mommy because her mother had passed away when she was only 3 years old. Well we never got married but respected each other as if we were. At this point two years had passed by and between the both of us we wanted to start a family together and eventually get married. I was now pregnant with a little girl and we were happy with the children.

After my daughter was born, I started to notice that my partner was drinking more frequently. Before, he used to only drink once in a while. He started to a new job after losing the other one and that is when he started to hang out with friends more, coming home late and sometimes drunk. He would start fights with me and as time went by, it got worse".

Part two will continue on a separate post.

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