Tales of An Adopted Clay Head. Walks To Work.

By Arthur M. M. Katabalwa.

On occasion when I have not had the money for transport I have joined the walking masses.

A friend, Ian, once told me that having money gives one options. I suppose having loads of money then gives one loads of options. Armed with what I thought was a wealth of experience and exposure I descended on the Ugandan capital Kampala to make loads of money. There are loads of opportunities about. You just need to know where to look. And there are so many pitfalls. You must know where to look out for those as well!

I was lucky that as soon as I arrived, I had a few days off and walked straight into a job working as a Media Consultant. The excitement was palatable. I knew that I was going to be able to touch the sky with my new job. Nothing could go wrong.

The owner and director of the business is an old friend. On my first day I realized that our relationship had to change on the spot. Where I used to call him directly using pet names, now he was my boss.  This was something that I had to get used to very fast!

Work lunch with Peter Sematimba.

Then he went and put me in a room full of kids as far as I was concerned, tucked away in a corner with a fan that was just wafting hot air round. It was a surreal experience to say the least. The oldest of these “kids” I realized was probably born when I was in S6. And here I was with them. I could hardly understand their jokes. I was old enough to be their father. There work ethic completely deferred from mine. They were talking about alien stuff; dating and stuff like that. They spent inordinate amounts of time urging about football. I couldn’t work them out for the first weeks.

When we were offered lunch (which was a downfall to my waistline) l always found it hard to line up with my work colleagues. For a while I waited until they had all served their food and then went and got myself something as well.

The work was absolutely banal after a while. I spent quite a lot of time staring through (not at) my computer screen wondering where all had gone wrong. I wondered why I had left my comfortable existence to sit in this absolutely hot annex. Christians know the story of the Israelites wondering in the desert and asking Moses to go back to Egypt? My faith was quickly waning especially when on one occasion another friend invited me to his office and it was the size of my bedroom. It was air conditioned and he had a team of people answering to all his whims. Here I was stuck in a hell hole. It really got me down. But I had to plod on regardless.

A few weeks into my appointment I was asked to look at our operations online. That was when I started feeling slightly challenged. I started looking at the business critically and I felt like I was part of the decision making process. I even started joining the others in the queue for lunch. I suppose I started getting out of my shell. I started getting proper helpings at the lunch table.

Later on I discovered why he did what he did. The Ugandan working environment is full of unknown unknowns. I knew absolutely nothing so he threw me on the shop front and let me fester there. In the process I learnt a lot about the work environment in Kampala. I learnt to readjust to the new reality. It was difficult but I had to. The silver lining is that I made friends like Peter, Jona, Benjie, Charlotte, Mercy and Dalton amongst others. To their credit they were not thinking like I was and they always made attempt to make my stay easy. We ended up creating a racket at our offices teasing Mercy on how she used to coo “Dalton….Dalton….Dalton….” when she wanted him.

I was also working with people who I was otherwise not used to and I had to adjust the way I dealt with people in a way that I had never done so before. If I was elevated to a managerial position at that time I would have had a spectacular crash. As many before me, we have arrived in Uganda thinking that the country works on systems and styles that we know. It doesn’t.

One morning I woke up completely at a loss of any meaningful employment. Nothing! Events had led to me losing my job. It is a frightful situation. You see, in the UK one can run and “sign on” and get some money from the government so that one can go by. In Uganda there is no social security at all. So if you don’t work you are flat broke.

Unemployed is simply horrendous!. Let me first say that we “summers” are poor at the “hustle”. The hustle is used loosely by Ugandans as a term to basically moonlight or work elsewhere. It also means working for oneself; to be self-employed. It would be alright if the system worked in a straight forward way.

Being unemployed made me see how people treat you. It is either out of paranoia or otherwise but you become invisible. My friends assumed that that I was employed and it is almost demeaning for a man my age (and size) to walk into an office with “campus babes” and ask for work. Once I was sat at a reception of one university and some people thought that I was a lecturer. For the few who were aware of my plight disappeared. In fact one or two I know have deleted all my contacts.

The effects are very profound. Transport is completely difficult. Let me put it this way; there are certain parts of Kampala I know now because taxis don’t go there, if you get my drift. Getting sick is completely out of the question. If I felt slightly under the weather I got worried for if I got sick I would be in a tight spot. There is no free health service. I was looking at my utility bills mounting. One learns to work out whether to have airtime (credit for my British crew) or have MBS (mobile internet) on my phone. It gets that tight.

With my friend and confidant Margaret Wamanga.

There are things that I have learnt about myself from being unemployed. I have an awful temper. I don’t share my problems with anyone apart from close friends. I know it sounds wrong but I thought I would rather lie in my cottage hungry than go and ask for someone for money. I always think that other people also have their own problems so why worry about mine? I am useless at the hustle.

There are other great souls I have worked with like Margaret Wamanga who probably knows all my secrets. Brian "Buula" Byaruhanga, Andrew Kyamagero, Blazey Blaze, Rosie King and many more all of whose names I cant mention here. People who are selflesly genuine and have made me go through tough days. 

In the depths of my despair thoughts of my kids always work.  They always behave the same way. If you have money they will not communicate. If you are broke they will still not communicate so the conversations are always the same. Strangely as well friends also help when one is in such a situation when they are not aware because they deal with you the same way.

One needs to keep their wits about at all times. And to always look at the bigger picture and know that something better will come about. For one to be unemployed in a country like Uganda is unimaginable. Ones options diminish rapidly and there seems to be no obvious way to get out of the rut. At times it seems that all that one has is hope against hope. And if you lose that hope you have lost everything.

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