Help! Babysitting is running me empty

A new study shows that babysitting takes more toll on humans than going to work—even if that workplace is Karuma dam. We see lots of empty study results on social media, like the one that screamed: “Believing prophesies of Prophet Mbonye makes you smart.” Of course, this is an empty attempt at lying, but not that of babysitting.

For the last 22 years, I have only spoken two languages: Swahili and English. But recently I have started speaking Lingala and Luganda and now I’m convinced if I had dived into babysitting while in Kigali, I would have returned fluent in Kinyarwanda. I have to string the guitar, purse the harmonica and sing lots of lullabies in strange languages while also speaking strange languages to finally put a baby to sleep.

And when you finally get it down, you log onto Facebook to be updated with how walking monsters in CMI arrest suspects before hundreds of cowed members of the public right on a busy street. As you start playing the clip, the baby yelps for attention. Its sleep beeping routine is over and you must abandon everything to attend to it.

The other day I tried to figure out what to write for Empty Tin and realised how empty I had become upstairs. After hours of staring at nothing, I gave up and said, “we can do it at 3am, that is when human brains are most productive.” Of course, that was an empty self-assurance because there was no way 3am would find me awake.

Been imagining how bad it would be if this baby was more than the attention seeker he is and been the crying type.
But the emptiness of mine is not as bad as the tin Amanda Ngabirano finds herself in. The Makerere don became a symbol of cycling as she advocated for urban planning to have a major place for cyclists.

As she trotted the globe talking about cycling and used social media to her fill, she apparently became a sensation so that when Jennifer Musisi threw in the towel, social media users decided that the towel had not landed at Museveni but on her lap. They want her appointed KCCA executive director replacing Musisi.

Imagine if tomorrow we woke up to public demands that Empty Tin should run weekly on CNN or the Beeb, that feeling… empty kabisa. I tried calling Amanda several times to find out how she was coping with the spams and the phone kept flashing a “caller busy” message. I concluded that the son of Kaguta had taken his voters’ demand in good faith and given Amanda a call and the two were discussing whether she has it in her to up the anti-Erias Lukwago fight a notch higher.

If it was not the Leo’s call keeping Amanda’s line engaged that much, then it could be her followers leaving the social media milieu to raid her phone line.
But on further scrutiny, I realised that I actually didn’t even have her phone number—we are still investigating how we called an empty number.

However, we have Ofwono Opondo’s number and that is an empty consolation of sorts.
I know OO is as tough as the muscles that make up the tongue and the sex organs but those memes of his selfie on new River Nile Bridge, hapana. Imagine OO was doing what Kim and Kanye failed to do while washing down our food and enjoying our cool breeze but Ugandans won’t give him peace.

So we called up OO and asked how he feels when those memes hit him with such fury. He laughed and said memes have never killed anyone. “I would be worried if I was being implicated in the arrest of [Yusuf] Kawooya, not memes,” he said.
Anyway, we drew up some empty lessons from this. One, there is only one OO and he doesn’t give a damn what sink you throw at him. Secondly, that if you do good, people will share your name, like Amanda. Imagine the CMI chaps with their gun-butting antics in public, they are even charged but nobody wants to tell who they are.
Oh, it feels empty reading this, right?

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