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Somewhere along the way, most of us pick up the idea that belief is supposed to arrive on its own — that confidence is something you either have or don't, handed out at birth like eye color. I spent years believing that too. I was wrong, and the boy I used to be is the proof.

I grew up watching my parents struggle to put food on the table — my mother a farmer whose whole life depended on the harvest, my father a man of a dozen trades who lost the better part of his youth to more than thirty...

I promised, in the very first post of this series, that I'd eventually tell you about the day I nearly died in a jackfruit tree. I have put off writing this post twice now. Not because I've forgotten what happened — I remember it in more detail than almost any other single day of my childhood — but because some memories resist being turned into sentences, and this is one of mine.

The tree was Ekyomukinene, “the one that bears big,” one of several named jackfruit trees on our land. It was...

I was a loner for most of my childhood. Not because I wanted to be, but because I genuinely believed I had nothing worth offering anyone else's conversation.

Growing up in Kisaka village, in southwestern Uganda, I carried a quiet, private belief that some people were simply born with the good traits — boldness, charisma, the easy confidence that makes a room warm to you — and that I had been born without them. I was introverted. Soft-spoken. The kind of boy who watched more than he spoke. And...

Some of the most ordinary hours of my childhood turned out, once I actually sat down to write them, to be the ones I remembered with the most precision. That surprised me. I expected the big, dramatic days — the fall from the tree, the nights my father's temper filled the house — to be the ones that came back sharpest on the page. Instead, it was an evening well nobody outside my family has ever heard of.

We called it Kulwazi — “on the Rock.” It wasn't a real well, not in the sense of...

Nobody warns you that the person who talks you out of your dream is rarely a stranger. Usually, they're sitting right across the table from you.

I learned this the hard way, growing up as the ninth of twelve children in a small village in southwestern Uganda, where dreaming big wasn't exactly encouraged by the circumstances around me. I had every reason to give up before I even started — an alcoholic father, a family stretched thin across too many hardships, and a whole village of well-meaning...

There is a version of this post where I tell you about my mother's strength, her faith, her quiet dignity, and leave it there. That version would be easier to write. It would also be, in a very real sense, a lie by omission — because the truth is, for most of my life, I didn't actually know what my mother survived. She never talked about it. Not out of secrecy exactly. Out of something closer to protection — hers, and ours.

It changed the day I realized something uncomfortable: I might be the...

I've been sitting on this story for a long time.
The Dream From Dust: A Memoir of Triumph Against All Odds is the truest thing I've ever written — the story of growing up the ninth of twelve children in a small Ugandan village, of a father whose drinking nearly cost our family everything and whose slow redemption cost me even more to write about honestly, of my mother's own harrowing survival of a civil war, and of everything it took to turn all of that dust into something I could finally call...

Nobody warns you that the thing standing between you and your dream is rarely a lack of talent. More often, it's a handful of quiet habits so ordinary you never think to name them as the enemy.

I found this out as a painfully shy boy growing up in a small village in southwestern Uganda, one of twelve children, the kind of introvert who lived almost entirely inside his own head. I told myself, for years, that I simply wasn't built for boldness — that confidence was a trait some people were...

Before there was a dream, there was dust. And before there was dust, if you ask me, there were trees.

I want to start this series somewhere most readers won't expect. Not with the war my mother survived, or the years my father spent lost inside a bottle — those stories are coming, and they matter more than I can tell...

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your hobbies and interests.

My name is Lukonge Achilles Musaasizi, and I was the ninth of twelve children born in a banana plantation in Kisaka village, in southwestern Uganda — a village whose name literally means "bush." By training I'm a social worker, an economist, a historian, and an IT professional, but if you ask the people I've worked with over the years, they'll probably just call me an advocate — for children, for the girl...

The Tears She Thought No One Saw
She carried the wars of the 1970s in her body.
The fighting that moved through this region took many of her siblings. She did not speak of it often. When she did, it came out sideways — in a prayer, in a silence, in the way she sometimes sat alone in her bedroom with the rosary, and you would see the tears on her face before she noticed you were watching.

I carry my mother's pain in my heart. I have said this and I mean it precisely. Not as a metaphor. As a...

What She Grew and What She Gave Away
She turned her garden into a supply chain
My mother grew vegetables and fruits and food in the yard — not flowers, not grass, not anything that was primarily for looking at. She planted strategically: enough variety and enough succession that she could harvest across the long growing season. And then she gave it away. Whoever needed it. Whoever asked.

I am aware that this sounds like the kind of thing people write in eulogies — the generous mother, the...

She Fed the Neighbourhood Before She Fed Her Own Children — And Never Once Complained.

My mother stood over a burning mud stove in above-110-degree heat.
She did this most days. The smoke from the three-stone open fire was so thick in the kitchen that you could not see her face when you walked in — you heard her before you saw her. Her voice, low and steady, arriving through the smoke before any other evidence of her presence.

But here is the detail that I have carried with me for thirty years,...

The Other Days
I told you his day began at five in the morning, on the days when he was sober.
There were other days. Days when the person who was up before everyone else and walked quietly to the plantations and listened to CBS FM in the early light was not available. Days when something else had taken his place.

I will not detail the other days at length here. Not because I am protecting him — I have long since stopped needing to protect him in that way — but because the details are not the...

My Father Knew Everything About How Things Work — Except How to Stay

My father's day began at five in the morning, on the days when he was sober.
That qualifier — on the days when he was sober — is doing a great deal of work in that sentence, and I want to be honest about what it is carrying before I go further. Because the man I am about to describe is not a simple man, and he does not deserve the simplification that comes from either hagiography or accusation. He was a genius and a drunk and...

Mr. Livinaari — The One Exception
There were rich people, some of them. But the rich, mostly, lived behind long metallic gates. They were enclosed. They did not care about how others lived.
I say mostly, because there was one exception I can still see clearly in my memory. Mr. Livinaari.

His wealth was a blessing to the community — not in the abstract way that people sometimes say this, but in the actual, physical, calendar-marked way. Thirsty and poor families used his large plantain...

Poverty Had a Home in Our Village — And We Wore It With Our Heads Up

Poverty had a home in our village.
I want you to sit with that sentence for a moment before I continue. Because when most people hear the word poverty, what they are really hearing is the end of a story — the conclusion, the diagnosis, the thing that explains why a place is the way it is and why its people are the way they are. They hear it and they think they understand. They do not.
Poverty in Kisaka was not an absence. It...

The Parasites and the Mice and the Things We Did Not Speak About

There are details I left out in polite company for a long time.
The jiggers, for instance Jiggers— the blood-sucking parasites that lived in the dust of the floor and burrowed beneath toenails. The rats that came at night and, if you did not protect yourself carefully, would gnaw at your nails and the skin of your feet while you slept. These are not the details of a story that gets told at dinner parties. But they are the details...

The House With No Floor But Earth — And Everything It Gave Me

When people ask me where I am from, I tell them Kisaka. And then I watch their face, because most people have never heard of it, and so I have to continue: it is a village in Kyotera District, in the south of Uganda, eighty kilometres from Masaka, fifteen kilometres from the Tanzanian border. And somewhere in the recitation of those distances, something in their expression shifts — they are trying to locate it on a map they cannot...

What It Means to Be Called 'Polite Baby'
My mother called me her polite baby. She said I had inherited her traits more than any of her other children: the politeness, the passion, the quietness, the way I turned inward when the world got loud.

For a long time I thought this was simply a mother's tenderness — the kind of story a parent tells a child to make them feel special. But as I got older, I started to understand that she was also telling me something about herself. She was saying: you are...