Love and Other Addictions

Addiction: The continued use of a mood altering substance or behavior despite adverse dependency consequences.

Love: An emotion of strong affection and personal attachment.

Kara did not know what it was exactly to be addicted to a substance, but she had an idea. She imagined there was truth in the possibility that you would meet the man of your dreams when you are immensely sprung on a narcotic; you both are. The immeasurable love you feel for each other overrides you both especially since you are high most of your time together. You are delirious. It is you, him and the drugs but one has got to go because you want a rich life ahead of you. You want babies and fights and making up.  You both choose to get clean, but while tossing your last stash you decide to shoot up one last time. You wake next to your dead fiancé. You are jostled into cleaning yourself up. In the first few months of your sobriety, you discover that you are with child. This should be a celebration but you worry considering the state in which you conceived. It turns out the fates are indeed dealing you a cruel load of cards once more because your first scan reveals to you that your baby has no brain. You die all over again. But you decide to carry the baby to term anyway and instruct the doctors to harvest the baby’s organs so that at least one good thing can come out of this mess. You go through labor and your baby saves close to a dozen other babies. You come through battered and bruised but right side up. You are one of the lucky ones. Kara knew there were some messed up stories out there in the world and this was one of them but this was just a story of a character in a TV drama.

According to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross when a person is faced with the reality of impending death or other extreme, awful fate, he/she will experience a series of emotional stages; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance (in no specific sequence). Kara knew what it is like to be in love. At least she had an idea.

DENIAL:  I mean what could have possibly gone wrong? She remembered shaking when her brain processed the message she had received by text. Apparently even the little he still felt for her was gone. It didn’t make sense. Last Kara had seen him; he’d said he loved her and now this? It couldn’t be! What had changed? She remembered locking herself in her room and seating at the reading table to try and process the reality of the situation. There was a pain she was feeling, a pain so strong she’d wet half the towel her roommate had placed on the table to iron clothes before she realized she was sobbing. She was aware her heart was beating…and then it was beating very fast. Breathe…breathe she repeated to myself.

ANGER: She deserved an explanation right? She asked him. His reason was that they had been too passionate. Again, she couldn’t possibly understand. She was mad.

BARGAINING: They could still laugh with each other. They didn’t have to say things to know what the other was feeling. So what if they were not a couple anymore but they were friends, right? She wouldn’t give up…maybe he would see reason. See that they really did belong together. He didn’t make it easy when he revealed the possibility that maybe one day they would be able to see past whatever bleep had caused his love for her to miscarry prematurely. She was still angry.

DEPRESSION: Their friendship was stunted. She was still mad he could still see. She still loved him though. The anger was still there, muted, but there nonetheless. She was beginning to see that this was never going to work. They were in a facade of a relationship. The sex was never enough. There are days she felt she would devour him and she felt that he felt the same way too. It seemed this was the passion he had talked about. They were together but not really. He wouldn’t give her what she so much desired; the certainty of a future.

ACCEPTANCE: And so she broke down all over again.  But this time she knew. This time she knew it would be for her own good if she pulled herself together. She was never going to be okay with him in her life. She was also never going to be really okay without him either. They had run their course. It was time to say goodbye; time to heal. There were no tears this time, just a grim acceptance that this was never to be. It had been four years of an on again off again thing. She had realized it ended in the first year really. Would she go back to him if he posed the question? She wasn’t entirely sure. And that was progress from knowing full well she would drop everything and run back to him. She hasn’t spoken to him in year. She is fine. Would she ever wish for a love like the one they had? No, she didn’t think so. That all-consuming love was not something she thought she could invest in again so they were probably right; her friends. They were right when they said she was damaged. There had been other men after him but Kara had a feeling she knew why it had never worked. She had never fully committed again. She knew she was ready to now. She hoped the love she felt in the future felt less like an addiction she needed to get rid of. Kara also knew she shouldn’t feel the way she did about relationships but heck she couldn’t undo the past. The slate could never be wiped spotless. Maybe there was heartbreak at the end of the road, maybe there wasn’t but she would never know if she didn’t turn on that engine and start driving.

40 days Over 40 Smiles…a year later

A couple of years out of University most young ladies are occupied with thoughts of good jobs, more studies, the latest fashions, relationships and the best hang outs. Esther Kalenzi is no different except for one other thing; her compulsion to make a difference in the lives of orphaned children.

Last Lent season, drawing on her desire to do more and her inherent love of children, an idea was born to Esther. She would contact as many of her friends as she could manage, and request them to donate all that they could. Whatever she received she had meant to send to orphanages and pediatric wards during the Easter weekend. It was a big dream she says, but it was also perfect timing. Seasons such as these evoked the spirit of giving in most. When Esther set up the Facebook group called Forty Days over Forty Smiles with Mahatma Ghandi’s “Be the Change you want to see in the World” as the running slogan, on February 27^th, she had no idea as to the sort of revolution she had started among people her age. These are young people, barely into their first jobs with so little to give and yet so much, as she was yet to realize.

The Facebook page Forty Days over Forty Smiles took a turn of its own. She had invited her friends, who’d invited their friends and those had also invited their own friends. She did not know everybody, but she figured, the more the merrier.  On the page Esther had asked whoever had anything to spare from money, to clothes and books to bring them forward. After doing a little research and asking around, she got to visit two orphanages “Make the Children Smile” and God’s Grace Orphanage.

By the time Easter came along, Esther along with her friends had managed to raise 3.1 million Uganda shillings (most of which trickled in the last 10 days). The money was used to buy much-needed food, books and other utilities. Whatever else was donated (sacks of clothes and shoes) in addition to the money was split between the two orphanages. It was a happy Easter for the children but it was also clear that God’s Grace Orphanage of Kyebando was going to need more help. Sporadic donations were all they had depended on in the past unlike the other which had a Church Cell dedicated to it.

The forty days had come and gone but the needs of the children had remained and so had Esther’s compulsion. “The children had real needs…and now they had my number, I could not ignore them”, she says. The Facebook page stayed open. Monthly breakfasts with the children were set up to all who could be present. “We wanted to give them a touch of the outside world; of family”. The breakfasts were good but they would not solve the problems that occurred in the interim and it’s for this reason that the charity bazaar idea came up. The response to Esther’s request for donations for a fundraising bazaar was overwhelming; greater than she had expected. There are days when she ended up keeping the sacks of clothes under her desk at work and having to borrow her mother’s car to ferry the things back home in preparation for August 4^th. Friends helped and the owner of a bakery near her workplace allowed her to use the premises as a drop-off. Mobile money became important too. Strangers approached her and trusted her to deliver whatever they donated, she was humbled. Esther and her team were able to raise a little over 5 million in a day selling secondhand clothes and renting out tables after managing to acquire rent free space at Lugogo.

At the thought that it has been a year since the project started, Esther smiles, “It feels like yesterday”. The children have grown in number from 70 to 118. They are not all orphans. Some children are sent there by parents who cannot take care of them but the host, Mariah Kiwumulo never turns anyone down. Esther is not in position to either because before her team came along, Mariah was managing just fine. These days when my phone rings, I worry…it could be anything from a chicken pox outbreak to the flu. There are days when I will openly guilt trip my friends into donating at least five thousand shillings so I can take a child to hospital from Kyebando. Most days we have wonderful volunteers other days are not so easy, people are busy; understandably so. Beginning of school terms can be overwhelming because the children will need at least 3 million for school fees alone, then there are food and classroom requirements. We are managing the best way we can. It is all about friends of friends and general goodwill…and Facebook.

Getting the bigger companies to sponsor their events has been close to impossible, Esther admits. She has not given up though. She understands that it will take a while to get her cause tabled or taken seriously but in the mean time all the fundraising and activities done will keep the children afloat. They will know someone cares, that the movie nights, basket ball games and football screening are all in the hope of making a change, however small.

Esther’s compassion for these children is evident from the start of the interview but I ask if it takes a toll on her sometimes. Yes, she admits, it has its frustrating moments as in the case of acquiring sponsors. She is quick to add that anything else would probably be just as frustrating. She has a support system holding the cause together, right from her mother volunteering her car to her friend’s doctor offering to do a free surgery on a little girl with a uterine tumor. She has made many friends since she started the Forty days over forty smiles project. She has also lost some. Sacrifices have had to be made but she doesn’t regret any. At the end of the day she knows that at least one child smiled because of the 40/40 family.

What would normally be spent on a night out is now donated to help the children. Mornings that some of her friends would ordinarily spend nursing a hung over are foregone because of prior commitments to events like the monthly breakfasts with the children and the fundraising basketball and football games. Not every one of her friends has been willing to do all of these things but the turn up at the events has always been awe-inspiring.

As we conclude the interview, I mention that I have joined the group on Facebook  Esther laughs. She says there are people who have left the group in the past because she “spams” their timelines with the latest news about the children, and includes a budget on which money has been spent on what (to the last shilling on salt) and how much more is needed. She wants the people who are too busy to be present but keep donating to know what their generosity is doing.

The bigger dream is in the works. A fund has been started in the hopes of building a self-sustaining business for the children so that they do not need to depend on donations daily. “I do not know what the business will be just yet, but I hope we can move on to another orphanage thereafter…and then another”

A version of this article was published here and you can find out how you can help here.

On death, disease and loss.

I had a diabetes scare once. I was fifteen. I had been reading a little more than I should have about the subject without supervision. I knew grandpa had diabetes so there was a chance I could get it too. I was a mildly concerned. I did not put much thought into it. Some days the symptoms were greater than others. These symptoms could have been for anything really since I did not have a doctor’s opinion but I had set my sights on diabetes.  I did not have diabetes. I still don’t.

I had an HIV scare a few years later when I took my first HIV test. I was eighteen.  I had no reason to believe I had the virus but the mind is a powerful machine. I could have breathed it in you see. My cousin’s nuclear family had been wiped out by the disease a few years prior. In a space of three years we had lost three people from the same family; Father, daughter and mother, in that order. It was just the son, my cousin that was left. He was fine. He is fine. He had been conceived at the time my aunt found out she was HIV positive. She had managed to save him. His big sister, small sister in truth, had not been as lucky. Her death was slow.  Parts of her body had begun to fail her long before she died. She got paralyzed on the right side so her gait was not one of the eleven year old she was supposed to be but that of an old man whose body was tired. The contrast was that Sharon was far from tired. She still tried to get around and play with us. In her little lady like way, she was very playful and yet interestingly shy in the presence of strangers. The last memory I have of Sharon is of her beautiful soft featured light skinned face, a spitting image of her mother, coming towards me, giggling. At the time I did not notice but the full memory shows that below her face, the rest of her body wobbled awkwardly with every step. Her face is still clear. Her laughter, a shrill sound that broke out into happy giggles, is not something I will ever forget. Bells, many tiny bells and scattering marbles is what I remember when I think of Sharon’s laughter. That and HIV which she did nothing to deserve. She was not the first to die of it in our family, she wouldn’t be the last but when I took the test, I thought of her. I was negative.

Recently, a year and a half ago to be exact, my Aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer. I did not know her very well and would not have been terribly afflicted by her death had she succumbed to the disease. She has a son. He is barely 10 years old. It is him I worried for when I got around to the possibility of her death.  She did not die. She did the chemo and had a mastectomy. The disease is in remission.

There is this other Aunt, my mother’s younger sister. This aunt has always appeared older and tougher than Momma. This aunt has never really been sick, you know, in the sick way. This aunt does not get weighed down by anything. Adversity fears this aunt. Respects her even I think. Cancer did not get the memo. Breast Cancer. I get scared sometimes when I hear how much the chemo is taking from her. I worry too when I remember the tone of her voice when she spoke of the mastectomy that she was to do and has just recently done. I fear that she worried she would be less of a woman without her breast. When I call, my cousins say the same thing. That she is fine, and except for the first time when I received the news, we hardly ever call the disease by its name. We all silently agree that it sounds final and it this is not, not really. Cancer is real and scary but I have known my aunt longer than I have known cancer and she will be fine. I worry anyway because I cannot see beyond her life.

A few weeks ago, a midst the planning that was going on for my sister’s wedding, the first wedding my mother has had the opportunity to plan. The first wedding in my mother’s marital home; all hell broke loose, without warning. My sister walked into our mother’s room and found her in bed, sobbing. My mother does not cry let alone sob. Tears, if anything disgust her. Joan came to me first because I have known Momma longest and I am most in touch with our maternal relatives. A sister/an aunt had fallen to her death, literally. Aunt Irene had not been ill; she had survived all the disease that had crippled most of our family. She was not old. She fell, hit her head, and died. Life sucks.

Aunt Irene’s body is the first dead body I have seen up close. I mean the first I have really looked at. She made me think of death again. Of how it will happen when it does happen. Yes, I get disease scares and death scares but none of it beats the real thing I’ll bet.

A child’s thoughts on death

If you are wondering about my solemn tone, don’t worry. I am wondering too. I guess it is just one of those days. The not so nice ones that have me looking at the end and not the transition. I do not know that I am afraid to die. I know with absolute certainty however that I am afraid of loss, and pain; pain like the one I am feeling right now even if I know nothing has gone wrong. Not yet anyway.

Broken things and letting go

My cup handle broke today. It has had a crack for a while now; a distinct crack right through the middle of the handle. I merely touched it before the upper part of it neatly dislodged itself from the rest of the cup. I had been going about pouring myself my regular evening cup of hot ginger tea before this happened. Ordinarily, I would have poured the tea first, added my two teaspoons (3 or 4 depending on the mood) of sugar and lifted the cup to go take my seat in the single arm chair in the living room. I would have been joining my cousins to watch the channel chosen by the head of the household, like I usually do. The cup would have given way half way through the journey to my couch, shattered to a million pieces of porcelain. It could also have waited till I got to my seat only to scald me as I lifted it to my lips to take the first sip. Instead, I barely touched it before it gave way.
Even with the handle broken, I decided I would drink tea with it anyway. I would not proceed to the living room like usual. And so, pensive, I took a seat at the dining table, and took a sip from my cup. There are many cups in the house but for some reason, I felt the need to drink in this one. As I held it, awkwardly because of the heat from the tea, I considered super gluing back the handle. It had worked for my plate when I was twelve, my Holy Communion present from Aunt Imelda that Yvonne (my cousin) had broken during one of her moody morning dish washing episodes. The vine encrusted plate had broken into three clean pieces, but somehow the glue I put held it for a few more years before I decided to put it in the glass cabinet where Aunt put her special dinner ware for visitors lest it break irreparably. When Kadie, asked, I hesitated only a second before allowing her to put in the trash, I’d use another cup.
It is like this with my life lately, cracks leading to inevitable breaks and then possibly mends or throws. I have been learning to let go more and more. I have been learning that giving away the silk Flintstones night shorts that no longer fit me is not giving away the relationship my sister and I have struggled to build even with the things we cannot speak of hanging between us. I am accepting that maybe it’s time to put my phone away and get a new one. That it is time to stop trying so hard at this job. To move on to something that may or may not make me happy. To try at something else.
I am accepting that the time has come to shelf my fear of heartbreaks; that I need to let go to be able to try at something new when it does get here. No inhibitions, just a chance. I am learning to live in the moment, the scary but exciting moment when nothing but that moment seems to matter. Investment is what the bankers call it. Win some lose some.

Clovis…21/11

Dear Daddy,

It feels good to talk to you like this once again. Am not bitter anymore; I am quite sure I was in my last letter to you. I was eleven maybe,  do you remember? I don’t think you do since I hadn’t seen you in a while. Anyway, in the letter, I was telling you about Momma and how she was making me suffer (she wasn’t really, she was just sending me off to boarding school, oh, she also had started putting onions in my eggs before frying them).

I thought of you today, more than I can ever remember thinking about you in one day. I was aware, all day, for the first time about how doubly significant today is to my memory of you. I may have been a little sad; may be a little more. Happy birthday Daddy! Speaking of birthdays, you missed quite a few. Am twenty four now, can you imagine what I look like? I must have been six or seven or there about when you last saw me. I am a big girl now daddy, in so many ways. Many people say I look like Momma; I stopped arguing because it appears I kind of do, except of course I am not as tall as she is. I seem to have shocked a lot of people too. Almost everyone who saw me when I was ten expected I would be taller, you know, like you and Mommy? Remember how I hated standing at the back of the line at school assemblies? Well, as soon as I was short enough to be at the front it had become more fun to stand at the back. Life is so ironic!

How are you daddy? How is it where you are? Do you still wear that leopard print Africana shirt you used to love so much, your Safari shoes and khaki colored corduroy trousers? I can’t seem to remember you wearing anything else. You still keep your neat Afro too, right?

Do you miss us Daddy? Me? I miss you a lot, some days more than others. I reached the age where I no longer think of my wedding as gross, Daddy. I think of how you will not be here to walk me down the aisle though, and then I wonder who will do it in your stead. I also think of the father-daughter dance we’ll never have. Did they used to have father-daughter dances in your time? But you know daddy, when I think about it, you would surely have broken a leg by now! You did have many girls you know. Most of them are married now.

Daddy, I know I said I wanted to ride a bike like yours when I grew up. The red Honda, remember it? Well, I never did get to ride a Honda but the numbers of motorcycles in Uganda now are more than you could ever have imagined. Yours should have been the last bike I saddled, till I got my own, because, Daddy a motorcycle nearly led me to you prematurely. Not to worry though, am fine now.

Daddy, people have been soooo good to me. So good. Sometimes I worry that everything good won’t last but God somehow seems to have a different set of people on standby to guide me each time I seem to run short of grace. Did you ask Him to do that? I like to think you did.

I know we didn’t get a chance to talk much about what I wanted to be when I grew up, besides being a biker like you, so I will tell. I studied Mass Communication daddy. I do love to give speeches so that toy radio with a micro phone you gave me when I was six was not entirely a loss it seems. The dancing you’d make me do around the living room in the evenings for you might have been though, because, daddy, I have been told I have no rhythm. I have however been practicing in the safety of my room. So maybe I will acquire some.

Till soon Daddy!

Rest in Peace…we are happy; most of the time.

PS. I hope you don’t mind, I use your name a lot. See, you never gave me your surname like everyone else, so I figured it was okay to take whichever name of yours I liked.

PPS. We found each other Daddy, all of us, your children. Be happy.

SaloneElections2012

I wrote this a few days ago. It is still safe…

It is an important day in Sierra Leone today. Sierra Leone has had many important days over the last couple of months but every Sierra Leonean will agree that today is definitely important and that tomorrow will probably be even more so.  Now that we know Obama will continue to be President of America, the question in many minds here is who the next President of Sierra Leone will be. For many it is pretty obvious; Dr. Ernest Bai Koroma of the All People’s Congress (APC), like Barack Obama, deserves another go at Salone, to finish what he started.  Others insist he bow out and give opposition leader Maada Bio of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) a go at the presidential seat.

Ten years ago the roles of the parties were reversed. Fresh out of the long ugly war, SLPP was in power, with Ahmad Tejan Kabbah vying for a second term. His first term as the first and only Muslim president of Sierra Leone at the time had been interrupted by a short stint in exile. His opponent was a younger, but just as ambitious, Ernest Koroma. Koroma stood for presidency five years later, won and is standing again, this year.
The last elections in Freetown were a peaceful handover to President Koroma, an alumnus of the Makerere of here, one of Africa’s oldest Colleges –Fourah Bay College or FBC as it is fondly called. A good number of people expect that these elections will be just as peaceful while others expect otherwise. Attending an emergency drill recently opened my eyes a little to a grim yet slim possibility.

It is exactly ten days to the Election Day. Freetown was a little quieter today than it is on days when the election calendar reads APC Rally or SLPP Rally. On these days the city is painted red or green respectively. When I woke this morning I was careful to check that everything I wore bore as little red or green as possible. These are delicate times, sensitive some may say yet others insist the fuss is overrated; better safe than sorry I guess. Many expatriates have made sure their annual holidays abroad coincide with the election period. Some schools have been known to close on particularly robust days of politicking.

I have never been deliberately politically conscious; in Uganda, young adults are divided into two main factions: those who vote and actually care and those whose only claim to political knowledge is creating or reading satirical jabs directed at the Members of Parliament on social media. Politics is serious business in Freetown. Everywhere you look, there’s a campaign poster or a group of people dressed in a common color; it is never a coincidence. Of course elections in Uganda are definitely as or more vigorous, given the population size and level of (il)literacy. There are also more things to distract you from the elections in Uganda than there are in Sierra Leone, like more than two local television stations, but maybe I have merely spoken like the foreigner that I am, examining a shiny new toy.
In the last few months I have heard little talk about anything but the elections. It is hard to imagine what Sierra Leoneans talked about before this year began. The newspapers, pitched on opposite camps, are in a verbal war. Aligned against each other more commonly for APC or for SLPP, it is difficult to realize who is telling the truth. To get the full story, you are better off reading at least six of the fourteen newspapers – not a hard task, since each newspaper has twelve to eighteen pages. Objective stories are hard to come by anywhere in the media, be it TV, radio or newspapers. If a writer suspects you are a hypocrite, he’ll publish it on the front page of the newspaper just as easily as you can publish a retaliation to accuse him of sleeping with the President’s wife.
The Independent Media Commission, the regulatory body and the Sierra Leone Association of Journalists are much like parents who have realized too late that their children are getting out of hand. The rebukes, bans and fines go unheeded. A ban was recently issued to Awareness Times and Independent Observer, ruling and opposition party inclined papers respectively, prohibiting publishing and distribution.  It was ignored immediately by Awareness Times, citing favoritism of its fellow publisher, which it insisted ought to have been banned on previous occasions for similar conduct. The other two banned newspapers resumed publishing the following day. Most nights in Freetown, like this one, have been peacefully quiet lately except for the occasional car cruising past and barking dog.  In spite of the election outcome it’s my prayer that Salone will continue to sleep soundly for many more years to come.

As I retire, the question on my mind is not who the next president of Sierra Leone will be. Yes, Sierra Leone needs a President with a vision, but Sierra Leone also needs more people in her corner than in the corner of the politicians and their parties. The media’s role as the watchdog of society is getting blurrier by the day. Salone’s population of seven million is small so maybe there’s little consequence what the media does. But what happens when she trebles in size, like she surely will very soon?  Isn’t this the best time to ensure the watchdog does not sabotage his ward?

Musings…

I have been thinking a lot lately. Thinking about life and if it is where I wanted it to be. Of if I even considered the complexity it entails a decade ago when I made up my mind that I maybe wanted to have a dozen children.  Of if I am deviating from the plan now that I do not seem to be getting to it. Of if I actually ever really had a plan. Of if I should have had a plan. Because, sitting here, in my room, with my head dully pounding to the rhythm of my heart, I am wondering if I am okay. If at twenty-four these headaches are all I am assured of and the occasional laughter of my many nieces and nephews. Of it will ever really be enough. Is it not how it is meant to be though? Laughter and happiness coming from what we share with other people? I don’t know. May be. All I know is that part of me is getting bored with the way life is getting mundane. I suspect it is not boredom in its entirety, just the desire for more; the desire for excitement.  For even more change. I guess it ultimately boils down to the fact that I would like nothing more than to find someone who makes me feel like I want to spend the rest of my life with them. That, or am merely PMSing.

The Ghost of Us

The relationship we had slid into was not as I imagined these types of relationships to be. We did not laugh together easily. We laughed; we did, but not naturally. Not in the proverbial manner lovers or potential ones like us were expected to or maybe it’s just me who expects courtship to don a certain decor. In his presence, and without, I would catch myself thinking about him and wondering what he was doing. Again it was not in that easy manner lovers are known to adopt with little smiles and sighs imagining their better halves go about their day. No, I bore a perpetual frown each time he wandered into my mind.
What was it I felt for him? I had no idea. I knew then as I do now that spending a week without seeing him would have been of no consequence. I did think about him though, a lot. Of if we could have a future and somehow it did not always seem entirely implausible. The scene that always came to mind was of him in a suit, seated on a couch reading a newspaper in a pristine living room, with two equally flawless children resting on bean bags on the floor watching television with the volume turned down so as not to disturb their father. I’d not managed to conjure an image of just us two yet. It was likely the me of this scene was somewhere at some women’s meeting or picking out shades for the living room curtains or better yet getting ready to join him so we could attend some important function. I suspected the detachment would not be something we would outgrow. I had seen it, in some of the most steady marriages; this calm. I am not sure it was what I wanted but I was not sure I disliked it entirely either. All the love excitement is bound to wear off anyway so better it never is there in the first place, no?
I used to sit beside him in the car as he drove, and I would watch him, not from the corner of my eye and not with a direct look either but I would watch him, watch him and I actually, in a sort of outer body way and wonder what it was that drew such opposites to one another. As he drove he would stare intently ahead, as if maybe the road were some strange apparition. Occasionally he would punctuate his trance momentarily, reach across to the co-driver’s seat and lay his hand gently on my thigh, or entwine his fingers in mine. He never said a word and he never seemed to expect my hand or my thigh for that matter, to be absent. All the while, his eyes never left the road. He never did anything like slide his arm up or down gently massaging my thigh, he just let it lie there, warm. Sometimes he would gently pull his hand away to change the gear, and return it to me like it was the most natural thing. There are days when I imagined he would announce that he was about to reach over and take my hand if only to break the interestingly calm silence that seemed to sit between us. I would find myself fiddling with his fingers at times. I literally found myself doing this, it was never something I thought about or even understood. Much like all my dreams whose beginnings I never remembered, I could never pinpoint the exact moments in time when his hand would reach over to my side except for that time, the first time.
It had been six months or thereabouts since I’d first met him, we were in the cinema watching The Tourist. We had been witnessing the particularly unromantic scene that had Johnny Depp’s character running across the rooftop in his pajamas. He’d suddenly reached across and taken my hand in his. Before this day I could have sworn he was not interested in me, not in “that” way anyway. Everyone else had said it was pretty clear he was but being the verbal person I am; I’d expected him to voice it. I’d be damned though if I didn’t know what that warm caress of my hand meant. Granted he would not speak of it, but he’d found other ways to express himself.
When we were together I think it was just our breathing, the late night Sanyu FM ballads and Sunday afternoon tunes from the car radio that he enjoyed but like a lot of other times, he seemed to be entirely taken by some other incident taking place in his mind. He was a pensive one this one. He burst into thought just as easily as Indian movie characters burst into song. Usually when I had begun to concretize my thoughts on the type of personality he possessed, he would do something to make me rethink my précis. Some days he would surprise me, come out of nowhere and hug me from behind then proceed like he was oblivious to the fact that he’d momentarily affected the function of my knees. Other days, he would leave home at 9pm; to pick me up from work even if I had a driver allocated the duty just so he could drop me at my house before returning to his, a 15 minute ride and a peck on the cheek later.
The surreal manner in which we sashayed into this “thing” is the same surreal manner we sashayed out of it. We’d kept at it for a while; a year and a half to be exact before we begun to drift apart. I realize now that he was likely to send me to an early grave from the anxiety that came from wondering what he’d do next. I do not know what pushed us apart but maybe it’s the fact that I had finally become stirringly aware that he was “courting” me or maybe we’d served our time. Whatever it was, I enjoyed the ghost of us.

It’s a good thing I did too, because I heard yesterday, that he had passed.

Tuesdays are Yellow

“In a perverse way, I was glad for the stitches, glad it would show, that there would be scars. What was the point in being hurt on the inside? It should bloody well show.”—- Janet Fitch, White Oleander

There is a scar on my forehead. No, there are two. For as long as I can remember, it was just one. I remember how it got there, that first one. I must have been 3 or 4, the kindergarten age in my time. I know it was Tuesday because I was wearing my nice shoes, the ones Daddy had got me for my Christening. They were made of yellow, purple and pink pieces of leather stitched together with threads like a miniature quilt would be; they had come with two pairs of laces, yellow and purple. Not unlike many children that age, I was particular and only wore those shoes on Tuesday and Thursday. I had just learnt to do my own laces and reached home every Tuesday afternoon to lace up the purple ones in that zigzag pattern Daddy had taught me so they’d be ready for Thursday. That is how I know it was Tuesday and not Thursday.

It was play time. Lucy was bigger than I was, I could see that. I knew I could carry her on my back anyway and I would have succeeded if I had remembered to refasten those yellow laces. They got in the way. I tripped, rolled down the slight slope in the quadrangle and hit my forehead on the black skirting of the classroom wall. I recall getting up and blindly walking in circles throughout the small compound that was Kampala Kindergarten looking for a teacher. My shirt was dirty. I had noticed there was a colour on it that shouldn’t have been there; they didn’t like it when we got our clothes dirty. I was going to have to wear one of those vests Teacher Betty whipped out on occasions such as this. I was at the little gate leading into the courtyard on the opposite end of the compound when I instinctively reached up, because Silly Bob and Kate-with-the-Miss Piggy-cheeks were pointing in the general direction of my forehead gaping stupidly. I felt liquid warmth.

I cannot for the life of me remember what happened thereafter, all I remember is the scar… never the wound.

The events that led the second scar to dock onto my forehead are recent and therefore more vivid. It had been a good two weeks. I had stretched out the celebrations of my twenty-second birthday over those two weeks. My university had opened to my last  academic year and the long fulfilling three-month holiday was staggering to a close. I had missed the camaraderie of campus life. During this holiday I had learnt how to man the radio console, taken a step towards eliminating my microphone fright, taken some French lessons and acted in a minor role as a nun in Kampala Amateur Dramatics Society’s “The Sound of Music” at the National Theatre while managing to keep my job as a receptionist at a surgery. All was well.

Working the graveyard shift as a trainee at the radio station meant I suffered when the driver skived off duty. On this particular night, I was in no mood to spend another night channel surfing DSTV on the fancy new flat screen in the office waiting for the sun to make its presence. So I braved the 4am hour in search of a Boda Boda to take me home, musing that it wasn’t that far. The first fellow I flagged looked dubious so I flagged a second who probably looked just as dubious but I was tired and figured the night made just about anyone look questionable in this occupation. The ride was okay up until he slowed to a stop in the middle lane that is in front of Watoto Church. He could have stopped for a number of reasons, I’ll never know. I’ll also never know what made me turn to see what was behind me. I suppose it’s one of those tricks fate plays on you when she alerts you of an impending incident you can do nothing to change.

They say when you are about to die your life flashes before you. I wouldn’t be writing this If I had died so what flashed before me were merely two very bright headlights. I remember thinking, “wow, those are really close” before my consciousness melted into the dark starless night. There was no pain.

In the time between the impact and my arrival at what was to be my home for the next month or so I registered only a few things, the cold from the side-walk pressing against my cheek, the pinkish-white where my brown skin ought to have been, my exposed femur, the feel of newspapers beneath me as I was placed in back seat of a car, the distantly cold feeling as, supported, I stepped barefoot into a pool of water in front of the casualty ward at Mulago Hospital. It had rained, it seemed, and I had also lost my shoes. No doctors? They were busy? Having managed to recite the only number that came to mind, my sister’s, I came to two more times.  First on that incline of what I know now was Namuwongo and finally on a gurney in what turned out to be the emergency room of Ian Clarke’s majestic International Hospital Kampala complex.

My sister Irene, smiling reassuringly. Darkness. Momma looking vaguely disturbed. Darkness.  The nurse remorselessly cutting at the boot Capri jeans that hugged my hips with a pair of scissors, I made a mental note to wear Bridget’s (another sister) jeans less; she would kill me this time for sure. Darkness. Foil blanket. Corridors. Big white machines. The doctor with an Indian accent. “Cracked skull, ” he said. Darkness.  Another doctor, definitely Ugandan. Many phrases befitting of Grey’s Anatomy were flung across the rooms I happened to be in, most of the time I managed to decipher only snippets. “Brain clot”,  “broken incisors”, “cracked molar”, “multiple lacerations”, “glass shards”, “several contusions”.

I should have been worried or scared about my health, and I probably was at many points, but only subconsciously because the only thing I remember worrying about was the small fortune my foolhardiness was going to cost my parents. It may have been the morphine in my system which, or the sheer joy at seeing and hearing from so many people I cared about that kept me sane and able to recognize me behind the ghastly image I saw reflected on the stainless steel plates on either side of my gurney. It may also have been the fact that I was looking forward to losing some of this stubborn weight, finally getting my spectacles replaced without begging Momma and getting better looking incisors; my old ones had been serrated.

In the weeks that followed, the dead skin fell off, stitches were removed and many scars were born to spread out onto the canvas that is my skin joining the ranks of the various scars I had acquired since that bright Tuesday morning all those years ago. One scar gave me the subtle dimple I have grown attached to, others dissolved into my skin and can only be seen if you peer close enough.

Lately, people notice the two scars more perhaps because the newbie, having not had as much time as its older companion, stands out darker on my not-so-small forehead. They are two of the scars among the many on my body I can never see without a mirror. So you could say I have never really seen them, yet they propose my story before I do. I usually forget they are there until some people use them as icebreakers: “How did you get that?”, “That must have hurt…” reminding me that they are there. Sometimes these scars describe me even to myself. They are like physical memories that teach and I think, sometimes reluctantly, mould my perception. It’s not by happenstance that bright headlights of a moving car at night may petrify me, now more than ever or that Tuesdays are yellow, even to this day.

This article got published among works of brilliant Ugandan writers here, writers I cannot begin to compare myself to, works compiled and edited by a team led by Ernest Bazanye.

Physical …let’s get!

 

There is a stage in our lives when we look back at everything we have eaten and pray to God it does not come back to haunt us but suddenly every donut and Cadbury bar you ever ate seems to seat with ease on your waistline.  At this same stage, we begin to wish we had been more physically active growing up; you know, made a habit of it. We begin to think that may be hiding under the desk during P.E time in P.5 wasn’t such a good idea. We begin to wish we had not abandoned running for our sports houses in school because we were afraid to acquiring “potats”.

I have reached the stage at which an involuntary sigh escapes from my lips each time I collapse into a chair; it is not as hilarious as it used to be when I was 5 years old and the person sighing was my grandmother.

I blame the system! Yes, I am physically unfit because the system made led me to believe it was not that important to be physically fit!

If you have studied and grown up in Uganda for most if not all of your academically vital years, you know that any co-curricular activity is not something you run home with achievements about. The traditional Ugandan parent wants a good report card, with straight “A”s or rather, 90s. Run all you want in primary school, dance, sing and act, win those races and bring back certificates but come secondary school they expect you to be “serious”. Why? Uganda ought to have clocked in more Little League winners, more Kiprotichs and Akii-Buas and less obese people but what are statistics? It’s all about the books now and then ironically you need to “pound those pavements” looking for a job, God help you if you are unfit because today, you literally have to chase that job. Then you begin to marvel at why you did not just take on athletics in the first place.

In the not so recent past, I took a liking to watching television programs that applauded or went to lengths to depict human agility, programs like America’s Best Dance Crew, Strictly Come Dancing, Figure Skating, and our very own Hot Steps and most recently, the Olympics.

I was inspired to become fit but I discovered that gyms are darned expensive so I tried taking yoga instructions from a book. This did not last long so I decided to jog every evening because mornings in my neighborhood can be creepy. I realized jogging is not much fun, especially when cars and their owners are trying to ram you into the nearest pavement. If I was going to be fit I would it would be better if I learnt something in the process so I hired my cousin to train me in Tae Kwondo. This was successful for sometime but our schedules began to clash and I had to stop. My most recent discovery is Zumba, it had better last because this sweat inducing dancing is so much fun.

What I must do has been clear for a while now, I may not make the Olympics but I am going to make it a point to preach sport or any physical activity to anyone who can listen, especially the children. God help us if these children are as unfit as our generation.