At Kibaale Primary School, Achilles discovered two passions that would never leave him: football and knowledge. He named the school compound “Old Trafford” with his friends, and could recite every Manchester United squad number by heart after a single week of studying a calendar his brother brought from Kampala. He passed his Primary Leaving Examinations with flying colours, placing among the best in his school—a result that felt, to a barefoot boy who had spent years hiding from teachers, almost miraculous.

The true turning point came in 2008, when his mother received a phone call from his Uncle Richard Mutaawe. The uncle arrived with a colleague, took photographs, filled out forms. A scholarship—not just for secondary school, but for both O-Level and A-Level, funded by Rakai Orphans Development Initiative (RODI). For a family in which no one had advanced beyond primary school, this was not just an opportunity. It was a rupture in the fabric of what was thought possible.

Achilles went to St. Mary’s Ssanje Senior Secondary School for his O-Level, then to Kabale Ssanje Senior Secondary School for A-Level, where he emerged from his shell entirely. He became the unofficial Geography coordinator for his class, teaching in the teacher’s absence, where he s ored highly in the Uganda Advanced Certificate of Education. He had become, as his classmates would tell anyone who asked, a different kind of student: one who studied not to escape failure, but to build a future.

Three Years That Became a Lifetime

On the 14th of August 2014, an eighteen-year-old Achilles walked through the gates of Muteesa I Royal University in Kampala, enrolling in the School of Social Sciences under the RODI scholarship. The dream he had been whispering to himself since he was five years old had become a building, a lecture hall, a student ID card.

Three years of university reshaped him utterly. He found a circle of friends who became family, discovered the logic of community welfare and child protection, and began to see that the childhood he had endured was not merely personal suffering—it was a window into millions of lives. He graduated on the 11th of January 2019 with a Second Class Upper degree with CGPA 4.2,  The chain of ignorance had been broken.