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| Amb. Adunke Olatunji, Founder/CEO Tabitha New Life Foundation |
By GlintsightNews
Research has shown that the different falls in the burden of care, expectations, and how widows and widowers react after the spouse's death is high. Women often carry more of an emotional burden than men and are less willing to go through the death of another spouse.
After being widowed, men and women may react very differently and frequently change their lifestyles. Women tend to miss their husbands more if they died suddenly; men tend to miss their wives more if they died after suffering a long terminal illness. In addition, both men and women have been observed to experience lifestyle habit changes after the death of a spouse. Both sexes tend to have a harder time looking after themselves without their spouse to help, though these changes may differ based on the sex of the widow and the role the spouse played in their life.
The older spouses grow, the more aware they are of being alone due to the death of their husband or wife. This negatively impacts the mental as well as physical well-being in both men and women.
In societies where the husband is the sole provider, his death can leave his family destitute. The tendency for women generally to outlive men can compound this.
In Africa widows undergo many practices after the death of their husband such as head hair shaving, drinking of bath water of husbands corpses, mourn for three to twelve month depending on the ethnic group principles, right of inheritance, women do not have right ...
The Bible has written several commandments about caring for the widow, the prohibition against harming her and the duty to make her happy during the holidays according to Deuteronomy 16:14 that says"
Be joyful at your festival—you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, and the Levites, the foreigners, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns".
Challenges of widows in Nigeria
In Nigeria, many widows live not only with psychological challenges, financial constraints and the burden of raising their children alone, but also with the cultural demands of widowhood. The duration and requirements of the mourning vary from culture to culture, from in-laws to in-laws. Available statistics shows that Nigeria has over eight million disadvantaged widows with over 21 million children. These statistics appear to be on the increase due to the prevalence of crisis, terminal ailments, crimes, religion, and politics.
Who cares about them according to James 1:27 which says “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
These challenges made the United Nations to formally adopt June 23 as International Widows Day (IWD). The IWD is recognised all over the world to address the poverty and injustice faced by millions of widows and their dependents in many countries and to raise awareness of the issue of widowhood. In Uganda, about 256 widows and abandoned women and their children go to bed hungry as their economy still struggles to recover from COVID heat.
So what? Who is she? Her Legacies and impacts in the continent of Africa, advice to government and prospective NGO founder.
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