My funny side of life

A Collage Graduate

If I had edited a newspaper at the age of twenty two, I wouldn’t get the peace and happiness that I today have. Let’s leave that. It will make some big men in this country who think they would have helped me embarrassed. Me I ran this race to here almost alone and so you, who is today alone, with this newspaper, rejected, don’t lose hope. There is nothing impossible.

I know what young graduates in Uganda go through because I saw the immediate results of calling you a graduate.  If officials in this government knew, they would have done everything they can, to fix the education system in the country.

Things worsen if your sponsor did not pass through Makerere. People until today think a graduate from Makerere cannot be defeated by this world. Focus on what took you there. Join politics and, think about these big dreams. You will rot from there. Now here is a sports scientist who, now, started wanting to write, at Makerere. Do you think this journey was going to be as short as I in the beginning thought?

Relatives had given me what could feed me forever, a degree. They thought. So what else did I need? The university I got the papers from was the most respected university in the country. I think all those who saw me there admired me. I was in hell. And when I left that university, I entered into another hell, the world. This was the beginning of my homelessness and all the suffering I later faced in the world. I couldn’t rent a house.

I couldn’t feed myself. I had to wear threadbare clothes because I had nothing to do. I was very poverty stricken reader. I was even reading borrowed books and newspapers. I grew up suffering and now I had dreamed to escape from stinking life and enable my relatives get some happiness too.  My mother became the first person to rubbish my dream.

God, I don’t know why I feared girls so much. Any child in any school in this country can eat posho and beans, and nothing can happen to them. But they are afraid. Their fellow children may they think they are cheap. This is how this country is run. Very poor people in this country are driving cars. They fear to be seen walking with feet or boarding taxis.

That the world will laugh. I have friends of mine from Europe. On a daily basis, they walk from Lubowa to the city centre yet most of these young men and women are very rich back home in Europe. I ate posho at Lubiri SS because I had nothing to do.  With such poverty, how could one bring shyness in matters concerning eating to survive?  I had to queue for that food that some of my classmates feared to go for.

I was a back bencher in class from primary one to senior six. It is there that we could make noise with my fellow less confident kids. Me I could almost faint if you insisted on bringing me in front to talk before people. Things change. I changed. When I today talk about men who wear one pair of trousers for five years, don’t over think. I was among them.

In secondary the trousers that we wore at school were the ones that we slept in. During holidays we could wander across Kabowa, Ndeeba and Nyanama in the trousers we wore at school. POVERTY!

God has taught me that this world is taken by only fighters and by force only.  I feared to touch in the soft palms of very beautiful girls at school. Years ago, a beautiful woman couldn’t be hugged by this writer of super lines, full of meaning.

There is no distance in Kampala here I have never walked. I could go to attend lectures at Makerere using feet for more than three years. All thinkers who go to universities and ignore the degrees that took them there will rot from there.

The course I studied there lasts for three years. I spent more than three years at Makerere University. You can go there and ask if you can. All lecturers who taught me are still alive.  When it became more than three years, people called me stupid.

Today they all wonder how I then managed to become one of the most important sports scientists in the country. You will if you believe you can. The world, more than ten years ago, saw nothing important that I would become.

I knelt before editors and humbly asked for help from them. They couldn’t listen to such an unknown writer like me. They shooed me away from their then busy newsrooms.  The times I was failing were becoming too many.  I failed on a daily basis.

Even if it were you, you could shed tears. I asked God why it was always me. You are not succeeding each time you try I know but continue knocking. That tightly shut door today will one day open.  Your product will be sought. We shall heavily pay, to go home with what you sell.

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