ANGELS ON MY SHOULDER!

Typical I is not exactly a daredevil. I am however not easily shaken by events that would be quite unnerving to the average man, for instance, I have brushed moving cars before. The most remarkable being when the car, a green Toyota VX, grazed me with such force that the side mirror was pushed backwards, out of place. Naturally I kept moving, like I had seen rat crossing a village path. That was a normal day to me. Today however, I have been left shaken, sweating, panic-stricken…

It is a normal morning. I have not worked the previous night, so I kick the beddings early enough, yawn widely like a hungry crocodile and as usual I remember too late to hold on my mouth. No one is seeing anyway, so I don’t care. It’s going to be a busy day, I have to go back to campus, pick up my clearance form and then panic my way to work in the afternoon. So I brush, take a cold shower after much hesitation and just as am getting through, the lights go off.

“Damn it!” I swear angrily, majorly because I had postponed ironing till the last minute.

So I get a back pack, pack my clothes and move to my sister’s. There, I am doubtless that they have electricity. They do not share the Yaka calamity with us. So I iron my clothes and put on a black tie. Well it’s a Friday, but then I want to meet her and the idiot in me (which she magically induces) decides that I will put on a tie anyway.

I hold one of those Ironman-Captain America arguments with my brother-in-law. Apparently, he thinks he can get off the grid, live without electricity or fuel and eat organic for five years. I think its bull-shit, he thinks it’s not. No point in arguing with him anyway. It’s hard to find a man who has a bachelor’s degree in Telecommunication Engineering and is a film maker. He is taking music lessons. He wants to be a farmer next and a lawyer lastly. You watched concussion, right?

It’s getting late, so I jump on the Boda-boda, half denting my daily budget through. I am feeling like Trump today, so I will fly to school, I say to myself quietly.

Flash-forward. I am in the bursar’s office, the whole place is buzzing with people, desperate students and staff alike. I sift through the heap of clearance forms, haphazardly strewn on the table and I solicit for the help of as friend because they are four piles of clearance forms and I don’t feel like spending the whole day sifting through the forms. I find it, I am not happy. I do not know why.

My phone rings. It’s Damien Marley, so I listen to the first lines, because my ringtone is my favorite song.

“Affairs of the heart, together we grown… if ever apart…”

Am not getting apart from anyone. Not soon. I still want the idiot in me anyway. I jump out of the eerie and pick up the phone. Kiiza is on the other end of the line. It’s been long since I saw him. Half a year? I do not know. We set up a meeting. I see him, it’s always a pleasure old boy.

I meet bae. Things do not go fine. I am having the teenage mood swings although I am decade past that. It’s amazing what love can do to a man.

By this time it is getting late. I have to go to work. So I walk to Nakawa Park. It’s a packed taxi, hot and murky like a coffin in the Sahara afternoon. Jesus Christ. I can see why I want a Mercedes cross country as soon as possible. Public transport in Uganda is pathetic. It’s my economic status however, so I curse under my breath and endure. I am humming the ‘we shall overcome tune’ and it’s stuck on replay in my head so I hardly realize that we are at the Electoral commission. I jump out. I give the wretched conductor a one thousand note. Of course I know that the fare is 500. He stares at me like the undertaker so I lose the courage to ask for my balance. No point in meeting my death over the price of a bun. Not today.

I cross the road and stand on the middle pavement, I still have another lane to cross. That’s when I am saved. I prepare to jump into the road and as soon as I put my foot into the road, I feel a swoosh coming towards me. A white Toyota Prado is setting upon me with such speed that I freeze in the moment. I can see my grave so clearly and for a moment I knew my maker was not far away. Then in a trice, I instinctively step back onto the pavement. People whistled. A loud mummer spreads through the taxis behind me as people stare at me like I have green eyes and webbed feet. I am dazed. I am shaken. I am blessed. I stand there befuddled. The white mist sweeps past me, it’s the car. All that in a second. Painful tears trickle down my face but they are invisible. All the while am thinking, of the Angel that pulled me by the collar like the kid I am not, right out of the road right before I met my maker. I have a second shot at life…

It’s 10.23 pm and am using the company computer to write a testimony. Who gives a dump anyway? I almost died today. It’s such providence that I had Angels ridding on my shoulder. I live to die another day.

OF INJECTIONS AND HOSPITALS... AND STRANGE DISEASES.

A stitch in time saves nine. We always hear that said and we do have but a slight idea how the saying works if it was to happen to us.  I think what it really means is that procrastination does nobody any good. Get off your behind flesh and get things done. A kind of don’t-wait-for-tomorrow deal. It’s costly.

A few weeks ago, I happened to wake up with a rare pain at the back of my throat. It is an extremely disconcerting experience and you wouldn’t want to be in my shoes. Being the African that I am, I relaxed. It would go. I would rest it out, I said to myself. A day later, it was getting worse.

I had had an encounter with a tonsillitis patient before, so it wasn’t an entirely alien ordeal. On consulting with google, I decided to assume a bachelor’s degree in medicine. I would be my own doctor. So I got two teaspoonful of salt and mixed with water and then gurgled away. It looks stupid, this gurgling thing. You see an adult making those weird baby noises and water splashing out of the mouth, I tell you it’s not easy.

Flash-forward, its three days later and I have not budged, the pain is getting more intense and this time I cannot eat. The day a savvy meal tastes like a punishment is the day you realize that heaven is not in the solar system. I was beginning to think of lunch with much apprehension. Then sleep became a problem too. One thing about tonsillitis is that liquids somehow hurt more than solids, so it is hard enough to swallow even one’s own saliva. I would keep storing the enzyme in the mouth for about ten minutes till I had enough, then I would swallow, or spit depending on my location. Swallowing is funny too, you crane your neck, like a flamingo, then tilt your head at an acute angle to ease the pain and then push whatever the burden is down the esophagus…

Thursday night was hell on earth. My throat was in so much pain. I could neither swallow nor breathe without making a fist. It’s annoying too. You see when you have a facial pimple, you can scratch it or squeeze it and feel better. This, you cannot squeeze. Any attempts to push your hand any closer to the throat and you are singing the national anthem. So I had this huge and excruciatingly painful lump in my throat that I could do nothing about, except gurgle salt water and skip meals.

I woke up, dark rings around my eyes, obviously because I had not been making much love to my bed lately. I am haggard, ghostly pale and only but a shadow of the man from the south west. It’s amazing how much weight one can lose with a week of starvation. That morning I cried. Like a baby. I don’t mean this manly red-eyed crying. I mean the painful whimpering of a scalded puppy, free flowing tears and all. Jesus. That’s when I made the resolution. I was going to see the doctor. No point in becoming a saint at 22.

See the doctor I did. So I explained my pain. You would think I was a pregnant woman.

“Doctor the pain is too much.  I can’t swallow, I can’t eat. I am a dead man.”

He got the flashlight and commanded me to open my mouth wide. (I brush quite frequently, so normally I have no difficulties with such checks). You should have seen the look on his face.

“When did you get this?” He asked.

“Last Saturday,” said I.

“And what have you been doing all along? You are in trouble young man. If you had seen me last Saturday, antibiotics would have been enough. Now it is an open wound!”

I almost screamed.

I still had a burning question. But I needed the courage to ask.  

“Doctor, is this disease infectious?” I asked.

“Well if you mean whether it spreads from one person to another, then yes. If your saliva gets into contact, the other party will definitely contract it…

Where the hell did I get the malady?

He did what doctors do, you know. Scribbled quite illegible statements on my examination card and gave me to take to the treatment room. Naturally I assumed I was going to be given a hoard of tablets and let loose. I was wrong because as soon as the lady arrived, a mean looking Acholi woman, she told me to ‘go behind’ and ‘prepare myself’. Now you know what that means. I hadn’t had a single injection in about a decade and a half. I panicked. I sweated. I contemplated Scofield moves. I almost fainted.

The worst bit about an injection is not when that needle tears through your flesh, it’s the sixty seconds or so that you spend lying on the bed, a cold breeze blowing your bare buttocks, pants down, waiting for the guillotine. I had quite lost my touch with injections. All I remembered were the basics. Do not try to harden or ‘tie’ your buttocks, lest the needle gets broken from inside and that would be a different tale for sore ears. The night mare was quite not done. I was instructed to pull up my sleeves and prepare for an intravenous injection. You know like those in American movies with junkies pushing God-Knows-what up their veins. She did this thing with the syringe and two drops formed at the needle tip, reminding me of the impending doom and then she pushed the needle up my vein. It’s not as painful.

A bad day is a bad day. I watched as shade of red poured into the syringe and I could tell from the look on her face that things were going south. More complications. How convenient.

“Do you feel any pain?” She asked. Of course I was feeling pain, even men do. She withdrew the syringe and scavenged my upper arm for a veins until she found a spot and pushed again. Lord.

You know what the Swahili say, ‘hakuna msiba usio na mwenzao’. Problems usually travel in packs. My eyes almost fell out looking at the bill. My entire month’s savings all gone in a trice, because I was a couple of days too late…

OF SCHOOL AND THE HUNGRY NIGHTS...

SCHOOL. I mean the place where kids and adults go to gain extra knowledge (and to fool around for quite a bunch). Well, the definition of school is heavily dependent on who you are.
To a parent, its months of relaxation  in a beach side condo in Hawaii, complete with fully paid expenses, a chauffeur driven limousine with occasional visits to Vegas.
To the teacher its a sheep farm. A very desolate place full of slow-to-understand mammals who seem to have heads specially forged from steel. Worse, every single one of these woollies is seemingly intent on accomplishing all tasks, apart from those for which they were called.
Its quite a different picture for the student. Imagine Guantanamo bay, liquid diets fed through the veins, punctuated with solitary confinement every week.

Back in the day, in primary school I was sent to boarding school. Grand mama cried herself to sleep that night because according to her, the child who was barely weaned was being sent 'overseas'. It was not overseas, it was just the next district, Kanungu. You note that am born in the land of rolling hills where kids learn to wield the hand hoe when they are still breast feeding. Anyway I was sent packing to this boarding school. Mama filled my head with hideous stories, if I ever dared to step foot out of my humble abode, she said, I would make make a delicious stew in Congolese pots for supper. I prayed the full rosary that night.

Not all was thorns and vinegar though. The new chapter came with a wide assortment of luxuries. After all I would finally get to wear shoes for a whooping five days a week and for mass on Sunday with the exception of Saturday. It is at school that I found the strange ritual of breakfast at 6.30 am, break tea (or was it break porridge?) at 10.30 am, lunch and supper.

The hardest part of school was hunger. Somewhere in the middle of the school term was a period, a terrible episode custom forged with Lucifer's own specifications. Pockets were dry, meal times took a tad too long to approach, stomachs got so empty you would wonder whether you even have intestines in there. As if that was not enough, appetites seemed to be artificially heightened. For one reason or the other, one was always wondering when they last tasted anything. At this time, the usual dish, half baked maize bread and beans in water, tasted like a french recipe. Times got so bad that we would decimate our toothpaste reserves, not by brushing constantly of course.
There was a brand, ABC Dent it was, that doubled as food. It was not to be hogged down though. The victim would gently squeeze the tube's bottom, applying enough pressure to release a calculated mound of white toothpaste, then quickly and skillfully scoop it up and spread it on the tongue. An alloy of tastes came into play at the moment, a burning sensation like sulfuric acid on skin coupled with a sweet backdrop. The latter was the prize. After thirty minutes or so of these calculated moves, one would get satisfied and happily head on to the playing ground. Those were the times.

Desperate times like these surely called for desperate counter measures. On one of those lucky September nights, the mango fruit season at its peak, we would sneak out of the dormitory, armed with sharp sticks and a strong towel, which we would use to transport our produce. Woe unto him that was caught on running errand. Your backside would be whipped sore and on an unlucky day, the teacher would reveal your 'witchcraft' in a class full of young belles, ruining your chances of ever landing one of these angels. Then you would know how deep the depth of feeling low really is. Fingers would be pointed, laughter stiffed and the culprit shamed to death.

That that did not take us to the grave definitely replenished our strength. We made it out, unharmed but bruised nonetheless. That, was twelve years ago, deep in the southwest of the pearl of Africa.