2007 - I'm Having the Time of My Life

I arrived at Buddo Junior School in the second term. That's the wrong term to arrive in. In Uganda the year has three terms and you're meant to start in the first one, with everyone else, when nobody knows anybody yet and none of the friendships have set. I came in halfway through. So I was the new boy, and on top of that I had better clothes than all of them.

I don't say that to be a show-off. It was just true. My parents bought me the best things they could find, more than they could afford. I only knew my home wear was good because all the children kept on complementing me and saying "wow" when they saw me. It was my first week and I had not yet been issued my school wear. I felt like the smartest boy in the school, and looking back I think I genuinely was. I'll put that on the record.

I had carried with me lots of the SupaStrikas comic too. My dad had been buying them for me since I was three, one a month, never missing, right up until they stopped printing them in 2008. So I turned up at school with these comics, a thing none of the other boys had, and I'd read them on my dormitory bed. I'd lend the comics out, and that was its own small economy.

And I could play football well too. I was pretty good, good enough that when teams got picked the other boys would argue over which team I'd play for, which when you are seven and small and new is about the best feeling there is. They wanted me. I was wanted on sight, for what I could do, and I knew it.

That was the year. It felt like one of the best years of my life. I was having a great time.

It took them about a week to issue me my house wear. Every boy belonged to a house, blue, purple, green, yellow, and you wore boarding clothes in your colour. Until they sorted yours out, you were half-dressed, not properly part of it. I waited the week. Then they gave me mine, blue or purple, I don't remember which colour I actually belonged too. At the end, I was fully kitted, in my colour, like the rest of them. I was one of them.

I cried a lot on the first day. But I remember the second day even way more vividly. See on the second day, my parents drove back to the school. They'd forgotten some of my things and came to bring them. I cried, I screamed, I pleaded, I begged the entire time they were there. I kept asking to see Davis, my baby brother, a few months old, still at home, and they couldn't bring him, and I begged anyway. Then they left, the way visits end, and I walked off to one of the pitches. FYI, Buddo Junior is a big school. A lot of pitches, a lot of open ground. I found one and I cried for hours. I'm an adult now and I still can't sit in that day for long. It comes back every time I go back to a boarding school. This memory of begging to be with my brother came back all through primary and high school whenever the school term started, every term I reported I thought of him, of course I stopped crying, it was now a small thought that got brushed away quickly on many occasions. You know that thought, "I'd want to be with my brother but I can't. Oh well."

Back to the second day at Buddo Junior School, The people who left me there loved me. They had forgotten my things and driven back the next day to bring them. Separating me from my brother. None of it was cruelty. That's the part I can't hold: you can be loved properly and left anyway. Both, at the same time. I grew up fine. I guess.