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 see, and what they settle on, usually, is something like 'rural.' 'Remote.'
Both are accurate. Neither tells you anything that matters.
What matters is the house.

What I Remember When I Close My Eyes
I can walk through it right now. Every corner. Every crack.
The house was mud and reeds, four small rooms, the kind of structure that the weather was always slowly disassembling. The walls had cracks that ran from corner to corner. The floor was unpacked earth. On the outside of the house, there was a lemon tree that yellowed with fruit and gave off a sweetness that I can still smell if I try hard enough — and an avocado tree, and a pawpaw tree, standing along a long compound that seemed large when I was small and now seems, in memory, like a stage set that could be disassembled in an afternoon.

There was no electricity. No running water. The toilet was half a kilometre from the house, and at night no one went near it because the dark in Kisaka is the kind of dark that teaches you quickly about your own smallness.
We waited for the light. Always.

The Room We All Shared
We slept, all of us — brothers, sisters, sometimes a dozen or more — in a single room. The beds were collections of straw and old rags boxed in with boards. Later, acacia poles. Our elders would fill lime bags from the road construction site with grass, and those became what we called mattresses.

We had one bark cloth blanket between us. At night the wind came through the cracks in the walls and our feet were always cold because the blanket was never quite long enough. The ground soaked in rain when the storms came, and the walls turned dark and humid and grew a particular kind of green mold on the outside that I came to think of as a seasonal decoration.

The roof was thatched grass. The birds made holes in it, looking for insects, and the holes widened, and when it rained hard the rain came in. We learned where to sleep and where not to.

I want to be careful here, because this is the part of a story like this that people either romanticise or pity, and I am not interested in either. The house was poor. That is simply true. But it was also — and this is equally true — home. And home, even a poor one, contains things that do not appear in any inventory of its poverty.

What the House Taught Me That No School Did
The house taught me that bodies can adapt. That you can be cold enough times that you stop being afraid of cold. That hunger, encountered enough times, stops being an emergency and becomes instead a condition you navigate — unpleasant, yes, but navigable.

It taught me something about space. When you have grown up sharing a room with ten people, you learn to create interior space — a private life that exists not in geography but in your own head. You learn to be alone in a crowd. This is a skill that looks like introversion from the outside and feels, from the inside, like survival.

The house taught me to observe. When you have no television, no phone, no entertainment of the manufactured kind, you learn to pay attention to the things that are actually around you. The birds in the thatch. The sound of rain on the roof before it starts coming through. The way my mother's voice changed depending on how tired she was, and how tired she was most of the time, and how she worked anyway.
It taught me what it feels like to be seen, and what it feels like not to be. The marks we drew on the walls — scribbles, drawings, the evidence of small lives — those were our way of insisting on our own existence. This happened here. We were here.