What I learned about life, writing, and ‘dry-cleaning’ from a cockroach in Kamuli

I have always wondered how different my life would have turned out if I had not run into Opio Sam Caleb. I had just turned eight when I was yanked out of the comforts of Kitante Primary School and thrust into the depths of despair that was Kamuli Boys Boarding and Primary School.

One day, I was having a warm shower. The next I was walking uphill balancing a basin of suspiciously green water that had just been retrieved from a valley dam two kilometres away. The distance was probably shorter, but it felt like 10 miles.

On rainy days, the path uphill back to the school was particularly treacherous and it was not uncommon for boy, basin, and green water to slide back down the hill, requiring the effort to be repeated. Over time, we found ways to cut out the effort altogether – both the journey and the bathing – and mastered the art of dry-cleaning our bodies. Just one cup of water can go a long way, I tell you!

In later years, when life was easier, thanks to the peace and middle-income status ushered in by the NRM government (insert emotional reaction here), I found that I spent an inordinately long time in the shower, and liked them extra hot. It must be some form of compensation or washing away childhood traumas.

Anyway, back to Mr Opio. Only recently deployed to the school himself, the young English teacher chanced on the idea that encouraging his pupils to read and write newspapers would improve their understanding and appreciation of the language.

He formed a writer’s club for this purpose and my brother Gabriel and I, having some decent command of English from the city, were enlisted into it.

Within a year, not only were we producing a hand-written weekly newspaper, but your columnist had also somehow been elevated to editor. I was nine.

I was also very small for my age, and at least a year younger than the rest of my class, having skipped nursery school. This, and the travails noted earlier among many others, meant that I struggled to fit in and find myself. Writing gave me an outlet and a voice.

You could bully me in the food line or on the sports field but here, on the handwritten pages of our school bulletin, my fingers “floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee.” Like a good publisher, Mr Opio stood back and allowed us the freedom to write whatever we wanted. He nudged and encouraged but mostly just inspired.

Not content with the school bulletins, he got the members of the writers’ club to contribute to a small newspaper that had just been founded around that time. Its name? The Monitor.

Mr Opio had also founded a chapter of the Boys Scouts in the school and he, of course, got us interested in that too and inspired a life-long love for the outdoors, DIY and a resilience that borders on stubbornness. It would end in tears when a school truck taking us to attend an international scouts jamboree overturned in the hands of an untrained driver.

Which is how we spent a month almost side-by-side with Mr Opio in the maternity ward of Kamuli Mission Hospital – the only beds available given the sudden influx of so many accident victims. We survived, but only just.

Anyway, I would continue to run a school newspaper throughout school, and Mr Opio would graduate into a correspondent for The Monitor newspaper based out of Kamuli, while also continuing to teach at the small primary school there.

Neither of us could have imagined at the time that two decades after we first met, I would be appointed editor of the newspaper that he wrote for, and for which he had encouraged a bunch of young boys to write.

Mr Opio retires from teaching this week, having reached the mandatory age but he soldiers on writing in this newspaper and I hope that he continues for much longer. They say that good teachers find happiness in the success of their students. But good students always remember those teachers who, with a gentle word here, or a first hand on the shoulder there, inspired and encouraged them.

It is possible that I could still have found writing if I had not met Osca, as we came to fondly call him. But I am glad that I did, and remain grateful to him as, I am sure, all his charges do. Enjoy your retirement, cockroach.

Mr Kalinaki is a journalist and  poor man’s freedom fighter.

[email protected]; @Kalinaki