Ten years ago if someone told me that I would be what I am today, I wouldn’t have believed it. The walk has been very long, and hard.
I wrote my first articles that are today widely read while staying in a rat-infested hovel in the slums of Kampala.
I wrote my first lines with sense in them using light provided by a candle that I had bought using the Ugx200 coin that I had begged from my very negative uncle.
Editors chased me from newsrooms. I wore threadbare shirts and patched trousers for an unbelievably long period of time in trying to make myself the writer that the world respects and praises today.
I refused go to St. Balikuddembe Market to work as ordered by my then concerned relatives. I concentrated on writing instead. I suffered.
Nagged by relatives and close friends on a daily basis, I ran away from the crowded and noisy slum I lived and spent more than six years dwelling amongst the most ignorant and poorest people, in Eastern Uganda.
While in Luuka and Mayuge districts, I concentrated and read more than a hundred useful (borrowed) books. I wanted to write.
In Busoga, on so many occasions, I completely failed to get what to eat and starved for days. Semi-illiterate and untested, and rejected, I slipped often and fell.
Onlookers ridiculed me. I was laughed at so much that I one time wanted to commit suicide. I called myself a writer who made the poor well-off. I was among the poorest people in Busoga.
I thought it would take me less than two years to walk ahead along the less-crowded road, to success. I was wrong.
To attain greatness takes more than what your recently elected politicians often talk about while convincing you, asking for your permission to access the flavoured cake. I learned.
It is a common habit among successful people to show to those idolizing them that the Promised Land is a few kilometers from densely populated places where the lazy and the poverty-stricken dwell. The walk to this freedom was long, and very tiring. You suffer, before arriving. Fight on.
