I foresee and now predict that there is surely coming a time when having or being part of truly functional family will emerge and remain as the truly greatest and the most sought after of all processions. Unfortunately though, only a handful, and a handful I insist, will be in position to even understand let alone attain the most basic form of such an indescribably great treasure. I will tell you everything but let me start from here.

I truly believe that the greatest legacy/ inheritance any parent can leave their children are the values and skills that they have acquired, refined and then passed on to the children through their time together. These should be the kind of values and skills that make men great and, at that make great men. Great only in as much as these values and skills can make one truly valuable and perhaps even indispensable to the rest of humanity.

For every long time, over now my 30 years of life, I have been at loosing odds with the fact that I could not quite put my hands on what my father in particular had or was leaving me as a his second of three sons. Firstly, even though I have never given much thought to the material wealth that he could leave me, mostly because I am in all honestly not interested and to a good extent reasonably ashamed of taking handouts even when they come in form an inheritance. It was also, on a quieter note, farther from my considerations because the old man had pretty much invested all his earnings in putting the seven of us through school. Therefore, the honest reality was that the odd dream could not have any material to it even if it were to pass.

Further, although he is and has been quite an impressive man in his accomplishments, given the odds in in comparison, my mother’s story on the other hand, has always been the inspiration of hard work and achievement that has spurred me to action and given the lingering encouragement. Most of the other things that men and boys learn from their fathers were, for me who knew a fair bit of my grandfather, better impressed by his strong figure and the countless stories that have been and are still being told of him.

But five years ago, because of a certain turn of events that I can now never quite attribute just to chance but more to destiny, I grew an insatiable desire to understand and do something about an issue that even now I still feel extraordinarily peculiar to have been drawn to. I was then inspired by two friends to join a cause to address the issue prostitution in Kampala. At the start, I was concerned by the expanse and pervasion of whole phenomena and quite disheartened with how little everyone seemed to be doing and even saying about the whole matter.

Although I must confess that the next three years that followed were for me quite more like wondering in a never ending maze as I tried to put my mind around a lasting answer to the challenge. I was at the verge of burning out on discovering that virtually everything an ordinary person thought they knew and understood about prostitution was all but a myth. Before throwing in the towel, as I desperately searched my heart for a reason to keep going, I stumbled upon a shocking revelation of a simple reality that, for me had been an uneventful norm. I discovered that unlike a good number of my fellow colleagues and people with whom I had worked in that context,  I seemed to always have made  connections that ran much deeper than the rest would even remotely master even if they desired with each of the women and girls that had been involved in the gruesome self-trade. Further I was told, in many different ways, that an unexplained veneration for femininity also seemed to generally punctuate the sentiments I held towards each one the girls and women. In testimony, many of them were shocked by how much more I seemed to see in and expect of them even in light of the hopelessly degenerate realities that summed up their life or perhaps what was left of it.

At first, the remarks seemed to come off as merely random, but in time, as I got to interact more both my counterparts and the women and girls that we were encountering. A reality started to crystallize out of these remarks and also from my own observations into a trait that was even for me, too distinct to overlook. To be candidly honest, I was hit with complete astonishment by this revelation even though it was fundamentally about me. The newly emerging abstract reality of the nature of my soul and behavior in and towards the matter and people at hand, now translated for me into new verve that fuel my quest in an amazingly new way.  

So more recently, as I was randomly sifting through the sea psychology literature and specifically that to do with child development, I met with a number of research backed theories that seemed to suggest a very systematic explanation to the ruination of the innumerable lives of the women and girls that we had encountered in our work on the streets. Quite equally significant, these same theories also seemed to unequivocally suggest that on the other hand, that it was my family background, which was until then to me quite frankly unassuming and seemingly common place, to which my peculiar relational element was attributed.

These theories in explanation not only founded on but also centrally fielded the fundamental concept that the nature and expression of the relationship of a child’s parents from even before conception until actual adulthood determines and modifies how the child ultimately relates not only with other people but with everything in life. These discoveries further conserved that the nature of the parents’ relationship was entirely pivoted on the man’s role.

For me now, in an interestingly personal way, it is certain that the different discoveries were asserting that it was the unrelentingly committed and compassionate care that my father had primarily and specifically given to his wife, my mother, that had ordered and ensured mine and perhaps also my siblings’ stable, deep, well aligned, and variedly diversified emotional development. Categorically it should be highlighted that the relationship between my parents, that my father engineered, and that I now try to recount, was not in any way characterized as fairy-tale-like nor as a spectacular show of continuous fireworks, but now in retrospect, can I simply assert that that committed and unrelenting love is what in a spirited way seemed to inspire the choice of words and direct the tones he used in the more than a billion fights they repeatedly had and are still having to this day.

Although it is needless to add that many other days were quite rosier, my very existence being just a handful of the irrefutable evidence to that reality, I now understand that is not just the flesh on my bones and lungs full of air that my parents and my father in particular is leaving me. I now, very gratefully appreciate that he has left me also a heart overflowing with and concretely lined with genuine love, concern and respect for not just for all humanity but in special sense for the fairer sex. His example and the environment he provided for me while growing up have significantly contributed to equipping me with a unique emotional virility and versatility that better places me as a pillar of hope to others.  This is indeed a very rare treasure, as I am now getting to understand, more importantly, it is only a father can bequeath it to a son.    I am not quite sure whether the my old man was even remotely conscious of what he was leaving us but … I foresee and now predict that there is surely coming a time when having or being part of truly functional family will emerge and remain as the truly greatest and the most sought after of all processions. Unfortunately though, only a handful, and a handful I insist, will be in position to even understand let alone attain the most basic form of such an indescribably great treasure. I promise to tell you all about it, but I’ll leave it here for now.