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 you in a single post. But if you really want to understand where The Dream From Dust begins, you have to start where I did: barefoot, underneath a jackfruit tree that had a name.

That's not a metaphor. In my family, every jackfruit tree on our land actually had a name — Ekyomukatono, the one that bears small fruit; Ekyomukinene, the one that bears big; Ekyomumpowa, the tree so generous a single fruit could feed twenty people and still leave everyone satisfied. We named them the way you'd name a person you depended on, because in the seasons when there was almost nothing else to eat, that's exactly what those trees were to us. I didn't fully understand it as a child, but I understand it now, writing this: those trees fed half our village during the hardest years, and some of the children who ate from them are grown adults today, still alive because a tree had a name and a family who tended it.

Chapter 7 of The Dream From Dust is my attempt to put that whole world on the page — the smell of ripe fruit drifting off a branch, my father quoting his own strange, beautiful poetry about trees dancing in the morning light when he was sober enough to see it clearly, the evenings my brothers and I spent at a rocky, half-dry well we nicknamed "Kulwazi." It's also the chapter where I nearly died — a fall from fifty metres up in a jackfruit tree that I still, to this day, cannot fully talk about without my chest tightening. I climbed for fruit. I fell for reasons I still don't have language for, other than to say a branch cracked and God apparently wasn't finished with me yet.

Here's what surprised me most, writing this chapter: how much joy survived alongside the hardship. I think when people hear "memoir about growing up poor in rural Uganda," they brace themselves for four hundred pages of suffering. And there is real suffering in this book — I'm not going to pretend otherwise, and I won't ask you to pretend either once you're holding it in your hands. But there was also a boy who loved trees fiercely enough to give them names, who trapped mousebirds with his brother, who watched a "moon garden" bloom pale and silver every evening like clockwork, and who somehow, even inside real poverty, understood that he was standing on ground worth loving.
That's the whole argument of this book, actually, buried right there in the title. Dust isn't the opposite of a dream. Dust is where you plant one.

If that resonates with you even a little, I'd love for you to follow along here over the coming months. I'll be taking you chapter by chapter through the real stories behind The Dream From Dust — some of them joyful, some of them genuinely difficult to write, all of them true. The book is available for pre-order now on Amazon, releasing February 2027, and honestly, every share, every follow, every future review means more to me than I can properly express. This isn't just my story. I wrote it hoping it might hand somebody else permission to believe their own dust is worth something too. For UK Pre-order here, For Canada Pre-order here, want to leave a review on Goodreads do it here. Catch my latest interview here 

Next post: the well I mentioned above, and the two very different routes my brothers and I took home every evening — and why one of them scared us more than the dark ever did.