Doreen Tashobya: A rising star gone early

It struck like lightning and within split seconds snapped up an invaluable and genial life --- that of Doreen Tashobya. She was 24. Her death was made more tragic by the brutal way it happened.
Graphic images of her smashed skull and legs locally trended on social media, tormenting family, relatives and friends. It seemed callous, certainly unnecessary, that facebook users shared the pictures without care for the feelings of those personally impacted by Tashobya’s loss.
She had created a world of her own; a glowing one where she faced adversity with courage and chose at a tender age to reply disdain, criticism and disappointments with a smile rather than rage.

Eulogies
“Doreen had a very infectious smile and, every day at work, I would wait for her to come to office and her smile would brighten my work day,” recounted Paul Mucunguzi, an employee at the deceased’s Akamai Holdings Company.
Her admirable footprint spanned and touched lives, positively, in prayer groups, community service, on school campuses and entrepreneurship. Tashobya, who had lost her father a few years earlier, applied her purpose and relevance in the world to her mother and Entebbe Municipality Member of Parliament, Rose Mary Tumusiime, beyond the call of a young daughter.
She did not allow age to inhibit her influence.
On the passing on of her father, Tashobya understood with mature instinct that grieving was emotionally overwhelming for her mother as it was both dreadful and energy-sapping for her siblings.

Of course, widow Tumusiime never imagined her counselling at the time would come on the cheap and in-house.
“When my husband passed on, she (Tashobya) shifted her property to my room and told me she is going to start staying with me and she did so until she finished university, her strength always kept me going in hard times and kept me strong,” Tumusiime said of her daughter who ominously seemed ahead of her time in deeds and thoughts.
It might as well have been undetected premonition of what has turned out to be her short-lived life.

Tumusiime said she was not then a woman enchanted with make-ups, but Tashobya swayed her to physically rebrand by telling her “mum, I am going to style you up; you shouldn’t look like a widow when we are still around.”
That signaled a game-changing child, and the world of her inspired mother turned on in unprecedented ways.
In death as in life, Tumusiime remembers her last born as “caring, loving, strong and determined daughter who enjoyed favour from everyone.”
It was reciprocal. Those who knew the deceased speak of her selflessness and disarming warm character at and out of school. Paul Kimye grew up in the same neighbourhood as Tashobya and both went to the same school: St. Lawrence.

“She has been a great person, who was always encouraging and supportive of everyone around her, and we are going to miss her a lot,” he said, struggling to hold back tears. According to Maureen Mukabuteera, a friend, the deceased was a “very nice girl, feared God and would counsel people, she could tell you the good and bad, I just can’t describe her in words but I know where she is, she is in as safe place.”
The manner of the 24-year-old’s death made her the latest poster of victims of boda boda whose careless road use has written for families tales of death, physical ruins, and despair.

Patrick Busingye who offered her the lift, was not a typical boda rider. He rode the family motorcycle on short errands. Busingye died in the June 21 accident when they powered into an approaching heavy-duty truck loaded with sand.
There was no room for manoeuvre to safety. Days later, blood stains were still visible on the bitumen at the accident scene at Muziga Park corner, a stone-throw away from the grand gate of State House Entebbe.

The pain enveloped both the young and old who filled nearby St. John’s church Entebbe to the brim for her requiem mass.
President Museveni visited the distraught family to condole with his MP, showing how higher up Uganda’s social and political chain the grief about Tashobya’s death permeated.
Her planned morning trip to a mobile money as fate would have it ended, tragically, under a truck tyre, resurrecting the battered debate about road safety in a country of undeclared contest between indisciplined or unqualified motorists and unyielding pedestrians and cyclists.

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