The Ugandan village devastated by elephantiasis

Despite sitting down as she shells bright-pink beans, Margaret Tindimutuma's swollen feet are in pain. The Ugandan matriarch has a rare type of elephantiasis that has caused her family untold suffering.

"I have always had allergies since I was young. So when my legs started to develop little swellings, like boils, I didn't think much of it," the octogenarian says as she sits on a papyrus mat in the centre of a compound of mud houses.

"But the pain became so intense, I would feel pinpricks all over. The skin in between the toes broke out in sores. Then my sons started to fall sick. I wondered if they had inherited my illness."

Her two grown-up sons both died after sores caused by the disease became infected, one in 2017 and the other last year.


When we could afford painkillers, my husband would walk around. But by the time he died, he couldn't even leave his bed"

We sit on a wooden bench in the yard, as Hope Amooti, the widow to one of them, shows me photographs of happier times. Her husband of 18 years was a tall man and in one picture he has a broad smile and shyly looks at the ground.

"When the pain in his legs overwhelmed him, his back grew permanently arched.

"When we could afford painkillers, he would walk around. But by the time he died, he couldn't even leave his bed," Mrs Amooti says, shielding her welling eyes from the morning sun.