My Story

When I flashback on my life today, I truly believe and feel that I have come from rugs to riches no matter what else other people might think. I might not be as wealthy as I might have been and I might have all that I would desire but my current status and life is worth writing home about.

This is my story and it might be the story of my family. I was born to a primary school dropout - mom and a veterinary assistant - dad who seemed to have been relatively wealthy in their earlier years of marriage. At least I could tell from the property my parents held and the land and the livestock we had. And my elder siblings did not really have an outlook of a peasant origin. The entry of polygamy into the family though seems to have come along with hard economics later especially for my mother who had to fend for us unaided most of our school going age.

We are a family of nine living siblings out ten children born to my mother and father and I am number five. I am told I was supposed to have been the last but four more children followed me.

I am also told by my mom that as a child I was lavished with many good things but they all wore out with the years as I grew into teen-age. I remember one very beautiful pair of canvas shoes and a baby court that was called Moses’ bed that only turned into firewood in my secondary school days. Those are some of the things that I did see in my childhood years that smacked of a decent or modest life.

I remember one Christmas eve in the late seventies we had porridge and peas for supper while the smell of roast meat from my village neighborhood filled the air as families prepared for the festivities the next day. Dad was obviously away at his second wife’s home and had done no Christmas shopping for us at all. Mom managed to buy us some meat on Christmas morning though. And we the chicken reared at home with had a good Christmas lunch.

Obviously I went to church that day in my school uniform like it had to be for most of my primary school years till I joined secondary school when I had the luxury of sleeping on a mattress, two bed sheets and blanket instead the straw mart and one sheet I had got accustomed to in the village.

I remember visiting Kampala for the first time in 1982 upon my elder brother’s invitation after seating my primary school leaving examinations and it was one long twelve hour train journey from Tororo in Eastern Uganda to Kampala in central. My brother was a physician at Mulago Hospital; the national referral hospital in Kampala and he had just returned from a doctors’ conference in India. He had a pair of beautiful Power canvas shoes for that quickly elevated me from the barefooted villager in the city to a decent looking lad – at least I wore them when I went to church on Sunday or visited other relatives in the city. On other occasions, though, I had to dash around home in Kampala on barefoot and in a pair of shorts that had torches (holes from over wearing and sitting on rough places back in the village) on the back, exposing my buttocks to the view of the public.

My torn pair of shorts often attracted ridicule from the rich neighbor’s kids. That is the only time I remember feeling embarrassed or having a sense of low esteem. It was normal to move naked in the village even up to the age of six and wearing rugs was not a big deal. Even in Kampala I had never felt embarrassed being the person that I was.

I went back to the village with my Power canvas shoes and it was a delight to join secondary school with my white them as a number of students admired and borrowed them to dance in.

For a while in secondary and high school I seemed to forget my poor background and got carried away by unworthy activities of various notorious groups that affected my academic performance. There were instances though that some rich kids tried to remind me of my poverty. I remember Friday when I was traveling home for the holidays in a taxi that was full of students from my village and one girl looked at my wooden suitcase and said in a derisive manner, “I would never carry such a coffin to school.” It was clearly meant to embarrass me because we were all excited to be traveling home and just wonder what my suitcase had to do with this pretty woman who was much older than many of the students in the taxi. I thought she had a better understanding of things.

I was naturally hurt by her comments even though I did not show any signs of embarrassment because it was what my poor mom could afford to see to it that nothing stopped me from joining secondary school. That wooden suitcase had also seen an elder brother of mine through O level and it was also the same suitcase my mom came with into my father’s home when she dropped out of college. It was the precious suitcase her dad had bought her for school. I can see that suitcase being given a blue paint touch after years of use by mom before my brother who excelled so well in his academics packed his few clothes and books into it. My brother is a senior forest officer in a Uganda government organization in charge of forests. I wonder if he remembers that blue suitcase and his first pair of trousers mom bought him when he passed his O levels with straight distinctions.

Today I am a regional marketing officer with one of the leading multi-media companies in the East African region. I have a company car to myself and a modest monthly salary that affords me a decent life and other privileges that a lot of Ugandans can only dream of. I have traveled to most parts of the country and beyond and I can enjoy the hobbies that were so difficult to practice in my childhood. For instance, I have access to IT that helps me write articles, publish, send mail and photos as I wish unlike the hard times when I had to hire with my little school pocket money a photographer for my first two articles published by the BBC Focus on Africa magazine. It was those articles that helped compete favorably for my current job that I have held for the pats twelve years. They gave me a competitive advantage over other applicants since the company was looking for marketers with interest in the media and the articles bore me witness to that effect.

Life is tough but manageable. I can determine and plan for my future thanks to our hardworking resilient loving mom who worked so hard to see that we got a decent education and never left us to starve. I no longer have to be called Maria or a sissy by the village boys who ridiculed me as I carried black soot pans on my head full of food and water for pigs - The pigs that were reared to raise part of our school fees.