Lukonge Achilees | Updates

How I Talked Myself Into a Dream I Had No Right to Believe In By Lukonge Achilles Musaasizi

Lukonge Achilees — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 years of drinking. None of my older siblings had made it past the first stage of school. There was no evidence anywhere in my family history that a boy like me was supposed to dream big. And yet I did — quietly, stubbornly, and eventually, out loud.

Here's what I have come to understand about how a dream actually gets built, piece by piece, starting from nothing.

You have to say it before you believe it

I talked about my dream long before I had any proof it would come true. I talked about it the way you'd talk about something you already owned. That habit did more work than I expected — saying a thing out loud makes it real enough to plan around, even on the days it still feels imaginary.

You have to think about it on the days it costs you something

Jiggers came for me again and again as a child, sending me home from school more times than I can count. Poverty came for me every single day. I kept my grip on the dream anyway, because I had decided, long before I understood what discipline even meant, that thinking about the goal was the one thing nobody could take from me.

You have to build a plan quiet enough that only you can hear it

I made a private vow, early in secondary school, to hold to one path no matter what tried to pull me off it. Nobody announced that vow for me. I simply kept it, day after day, until the plan and the person following it became indistinguishable from each other.

You have to let your worth stop depending on your circumstances

The hardest belief I ever had to drop was low self-esteem, and I dropped it as an introvert, not despite being one. Self-worth, I learned, has nothing to do with the money in your pocket or the hardship waiting at home. It has to do with the person you actually are, underneath all of it — and that person deserves the same respect you hand out so freely to everyone else.

I found my own way out of that particular fire on a school compound in St. Mary's Ssanje, mostly through football, of all things. I let people see what I could do with a ball, and for the first time in my life, I heard people calling my name. Wherever I went after that, people expected me to be good even at the jokes — and underneath the boy they thought they knew, they found a calm, developed mind where they had once seen only someone quiet and self-doubting.

Whatever you believe is what you eventually achieve. What you imagine is what you slowly become. I know that sounds like something stitched onto a wall hanging, but I lived inside the truth of it long before I ever saw it written down anywhere else.

If some part of you is still waiting for confidence to arrive before you start, I'd gently ask you to stop waiting. Say the dream out loud. Think about it on the hard days. Build the quiet plan. And let your worth stand on its own, independent of everything still standing in your way.

This is one of the life lessons at the heart of my memoir, The Dream From Dust: A Memoir of Triumph Against All Odds, releasing February 2027 and available for pre-order now on Amazon. If you love to join my ARC READERS TEAM Apply_here. If this resonated with you, I'd love for you to follow along as I share more of the story behind it.

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Fifty Metres, One Cracking Branch, and the Tree I Never Climbed Again: Behind the Scenes of Chapter 7, “The Dream Begins at Home”

Lukonge Achilees — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 everyone's favourite, mine included, because it sat low against a windswept hill in a cool, breezy stretch of ground, near the house in old coffee plantation, its branches fanning out wide and close to the earth, some barely a metre off the soil. Children could climb it in minutes. It was a secret hideout that, in practice, every child in the village knew about — which is its own small joke, but that's exactly what it was to us.

That particular day, I climbed the way I always did — in my dirty working clothes, chasing the smell of ripe fruit drifting from somewhere far out along a branch. I told myself I would stop once the fruit was in my hands. I crawled forward on my belly instead, pulling myself along with the help of smaller junction branches beneath me, and a few metres in, I heard a cracking sound behind me. I assumed it was a dry branch falling somewhere below. I kept going.

The cracking didn't stop. It grew. By the time I turned to look for it, it was already too late for me to fully understand what was happening — the crack had opened deep from the top of the branch, and only a single thread of fresh inner wood was still holding me, and everything behind me, in place. I tried to hurry back the way I'd come. I couldn't. I fell fifty metres, tangled in branches the whole way down, and what happened after that I genuinely cannot tell you, because my mind went dark and stayed dark until the next day, when I woke to being told I had somehow survived.

Writing that paragraph took me longer than almost anything else in the whole manuscript. Not because the sentences were hard to find — the sentences came almost too easily, which was its own strange discomfort — but because I had to sit, again, inside a version of myself that had no idea, in that moment, whether he was going to live. I don't think you ever fully leave that version of yourself behind. Even now, decades later, my chest tightens whenever the memory surfaces uninvited, which it still does, more often than I expected it to.

I have never climbed a tree since. Not a small one. Not even to look. It is, I think, the one fear from my childhood I never talked myself out of, and writing Chapter 7 taught me something about that: not every fear needs to be conquered to be honoured. Some of them are simply the body's way of remembering a mercy it was given once, and would rather not test twice.

I debated, right up until the final draft, whether to include this story at all. It would have been easy to leave it out — to let the book stay in the warmer, gentler parts of that chapter: the named trees, the evening walks, my father's poetry about dancing branches. But I made a promise to myself early on, writing this whole memoir, that I would show both the harvest and the weeds. This is one of the weeds. It nearly ended everything before the rest of the story had a chance to happen, and I think that's exactly why it belongs on the page.

The Dream From Dust is available for pre-order now on Amazon, with release set for February 2027, If you need to join ARC Team to get free copy in exchange for a honest review slots are still available, apply_here. If this story moved you even slightly, I'd be grateful if you'd follow along for what's coming next, and share it with someone who needs to hear it. Stories like this one only survive if someone keeps telling them.

Next post: the question a chemistry teacher asked me one ordinary morning — and the answer that quietly set the rest of this book in motion.

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What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Self-Esteem Before I Turned 15 By Lukonge Achilles Musaasizi

Lukonge Achilees — Sat, 5 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 for years, I mistook that temperament for a verdict on my worth.

Nobody sat me down and told me the truth: that self-esteem has almost nothing to do with your circumstances, and everything to do with the story you're quietly telling yourself about those circumstances.

I want to tell you what I eventually figured out, because I wish someone had handed it to me sooner.

Your bank account is not a measure of your worth. Neither is your family's reputation, your father's mistakes, or the hardest chapter of your life so far. I have met people who survived scenes too painful to describe and still built extraordinary lives out of the wreckage. Self-worth was never about what happened to you. It's about the person underneath everything that happened.

Here's the strange part: how you see yourself has a way of teaching other people how to see you too. I used to walk through the world assuming I had nothing to contribute, and, unsurprisingly, the world mostly agreed with me. It wasn't until secondary school, when I decided — almost as an experiment — to stop hiding, that anything changed. I let people see what I could do on a football pitch. I stopped disappearing into the back of the classroom. And slowly, to my own genuine shock, people started calling my name.

Low self-esteem has a familiar shape: you doubt yourself constantly, you hide your real feelings, you can't quite take credit for what you've actually accomplished, and change terrifies you. High self-esteem looks almost exactly the opposite — secure, expressive, able to forgive your own mistakes as easily as you'd forgive someone else's, and brave enough to keep chasing whatever you're chasing, even when it's hard.

The good news is that self-esteem isn't fixed. It's built, slowly, the same way anything worth having is built. Stop taking every piece of criticism straight to the heart — listen for whatever truth is buried inside it, and let the rest go. Give yourself a few honest minutes each day to take stock of your own good points. Celebrate the small wins, not just the big ones. Do at least one thing daily purely because you enjoy it, without apologizing for it. And speak to yourself the way you'd speak to someone you actually loved.

If you're the version of me that was still hiding at fourteen, hear this clearly: you are allowed to take up space. The world is far more willing to make room for you than you think.

This is one of the reflections at the heart of my forthcoming memoir, The Dream From Dust: A Memoir of Triumph Against All Odds, out February 2027 and available for pre-order now on Amazon. I'll be sharing more of these stories in the weeks ahead — I hope you'll stick around for them. Want to join my ARC READERS TEAM slots still Available_here ]]>

The Well We Called “On the Rock,” and the Two Roads Home: Behind the Scenes of Chapter 7, “The Dream Begins at Home”

Lukonge Achilees — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 something dug and maintained. It was a temporary basin, rocky the whole way down, roughly a hundred feet from the surface to the water below, with no spring feeding it. During the wet season it filled to the brim. Without rain, it took five or six months to dry up completely. My little brothers Emanuel and Talemwa and I used to slide down toward it almost every evening once the day's heat had broken, and I spent longer than I expected, writing Chapter 7, trying to find language for what that place actually sounded like — the frogs, the toads, the crickets, a night bird occasionally dropping onto the water and sending a small crash echoing up the rock walls.

Around it sat three gardens, each one belonging to somebody in my memory almost as clearly as it belonged to its owner on paper: Mr. Bbaale Namuna's garden to the west, the Chairman's to the south, our own eucalyptus stretching east and west. I hadn't thought about those three gardens in years before I started writing this chapter. Once I did, I couldn't stop.

But the detail that ended up meaning the most to me, once the chapter was finished, wasn't the well at all. It was the walk home afterward — because there were always two ways back, and choosing between them was never as simple as it should have been.
One route ran past the Messiah-banana grove. The other cut through what we called the Chairman-Kayembe path. Either way, the sun was already dropping by the time we set off, and either way, the plantation air did something to you that I still don't have a perfect word for — a heavy, sweet, slightly dangerous mix of ripening fruit, damp soil, and coffee blossom that pulled you deeper into the dark even while some part of your brain was reminding you that dinner, and the evening's chores, and your mother's patience, were all waiting at the other end. No one ever hurried on those paths. And because no one ever hurried, a great many of us were punished, more evenings than I can count, for arriving home with the work still undone.

At the centre of the plantation stood one enormous bark tree, buttressed and deeply grooved, almost carved-looking, that my father loved more than any other tree we owned. I was told my mother gave birth to more than five of my siblings in its shade, and that its bark — stripped, cured, and sold as bark cloth — helped feed our family for years. Writing that sentence for the first time, I sat back from the laptop for a while. It is one thing to know, abstractly, that a tree in your family's yard had significance. It is another thing to realize, mid-sentence, that the same tree witnessed half your siblings being born and helped keep the rest of you fed.

That's the thing I keep learning, chapter by chapter, writing this book: the biggest moments of my life rarely announced themselves as big while they were happening. Most of them looked exactly like an ordinary evening — two tired boys choosing a path home, a well with a nickname, a tree nobody thought to write down until one of the children it sheltered finally sat down, decades later, and did.

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. If you need to jo n ARC READERS TEAM APPLY_NOW. 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.

Next post: the day I finally climbed too high — and what fifty metres of falling actually felt like.

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The Five People Who Can Quietly Kill Your Dream (And How I Learned to Spot Them) By Lukonge Achilles Musaasizi

Lukonge Achilees — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 people who assumed a boy like me would end up exactly where his father had. But somewhere in the middle of all that noise, I picked up a habit that changed everything: I started paying very close attention to who I let close to me.

Here's what I noticed. There are five kinds of people who can quietly talk you out of a dream, and once you learn to spot them, you'll see them everywhere.

The complainers will tell you, in exhausting detail, everything that's wrong with their life — and they'll never once lift a finger to change it. Spend enough time around a complainer and you'll catch yourself complaining too. Pessimism is contagious that way.

The entitled believe the world owes them something, and they'll happily convince you that it owes you nothing at all.

The conformers are the most popular people in the room, precisely because they never push against anything. They punch the clock, go home, sleep, and do it all again tomorrow. There's nothing wrong with a steady life — but a dream cannot survive inside that particular loop.

The party animals will make you laugh, and they'll also make you late for the version of your life you actually wanted. I watched too many childhood friends trade their future for a good night out, one weekend at a time, until there were no weekends left to trade.

And then there are the doubters — the ones who listen to your biggest dream and immediately, gently, tell you it's probably not realistic. Of everyone on this list, the doubters are the most dangerous, because they usually love you. That's exactly why you listen to them.

I'm not telling you to cut everyone difficult out of your life. I'm telling you to notice. Notice who leaves you lighter after a conversation, and who leaves you smaller. Notice who asks about your dream and actually wants to hear the answer.

I built my own life — my education, my career in social work, the humanitarian foundation I eventually started — by being deliberate about exactly this. Jim Rohn once said you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. I believed him early, and I still do.

If you're chasing something right now that feels too big for the room you're standing in, take a look around that room first. You might be surrounded by more of these five people than you realize. And you might be one honest conversation away from finding better company.

This is one of the life lessons at the heart of my memoir, The Dream From Dust: A Memoir of Triumph Against All Odds, releasing February 2027 and available for pre-order now on Amazon. If this resonated with you, I'd love for you to follow along as I share more of the story behind it. ]]>

My Mother Survived a War She Never Meant to Tell Us About: Behind the Scenes of Chapter 6, "Survived by God's Grace and Mercy"

Lukonge Achilees — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 last generation in my family to hear this story first-hand, in her own voice, before it disappeared entirely. My mother is not a naturally talkative woman. She is aged now, and she has never been the type to sit us down and perform her own history for an audience. So when I finally asked her to tell us — really tell us, in full, everything — I genuinely didn't know if she had it in her, or if I had any right to ask.

What happened next became the emotional core of Chapter 6, and honestly, one of the hardest and most important things I've ever written.

My mother was twenty years old when the 1978–79 Uganda–Tanzania War reached her village. She told us about the bombardment of the border town nearest our home, which she first mistook, in the chaos of the first hours, for an unusually violent thunderstorm. She told us about fleeing through bush and swampland with three children under the age of three — one of them tied against her own body, another balanced in a wooden box lashed to a borrowed bicycle — crawling on her stomach beneath gunfire, hiding in a refugee camp where mosquitoes the size of small jets fed on anyone still enough to be caught, where a storm she still describes as something like a tornado flattened half the shelters in a single afternoon. She told us about a second displacement, when the war swept back through and undid whatever safety they'd found. She told us about the four separate times she nearly died.

We sat under an avocado tree while she told us this, over the course of several afternoons, because — and this detail still moves me every time I think about it — she could only give us an hour or so before her next church meeting, or before lunch needed making, or before the day simply demanded she be someone other than a witness to history for a while. There is something almost unbearably human about that. The worst thing that ever happened to my mother, and she was still fitting the telling of it in between chores.

I made a promise to myself while writing this chapter: I would not let her memory die with her. Uganda's civil wars are, by international standards, some of the least documented conflicts of the twentieth century — this one especially, lasting only seven months, too short, apparently, to draw the world's sustained attention even while it was reshaping an entire generation of families like mine. So this chapter is, in part, an act of preservation. It's oral history, recorded by a son who almost didn't ask in time.

I won't give away everything here — there's a reason the book exists, after all, and some of what my mother told us is simply too much to summarize in a blog post without doing it an injustice. But I will tell you this: by the end of writing this chapter, I understood my own resilience differently. I come from a woman who survived a war with three babies and a borrowed bicycle, and then came home and quietly raised twelve children anyway. Whatever I've managed to build in my own life, I built standing on ground she cleared for me first, at a cost I'm still learning the full shape of.

The Dream From Dust is available for pre-order now on Amazon, with release set for February 2027. If this story moved you even slightly, I'd be grateful if you'd follow along for what's coming next, share this post with someone who needs to hear it, and consider leaving a review once the book is in your hands. Stories like my mother's only survive if someone keeps telling them.

Next post: what it actually looked like to fall from fifty metres up in a jackfruit tree — and why I never climbed one again. ]]>

I'm Looking for 50 People to Read My Book Before Anyone Else Does By Lukonge Achilles Musaasizi

Lukonge Achilees — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 a life. It releases February 6, 2027, and it's available for pre-order right now on Amazon.
But before it reaches the world, I want it to reach you first.

I'm putting together an ARC team — a small group of readers who will receive an advance digital copy of The Dream From Dust ahead of release, in exchange for nothing more than an honest review around launch day. Not a glowing one. Not a five-star one. Just an honest one. If something in this book doesn't land for you, I want to know that too.

Here's what's in it for you: you'll read the book weeks before anyone else can buy it, you'll have a direct hand in how it's received when it finally launches, and fifteen selected readers will also receive a special ARC box — because a book like this one, built entirely out of dust and stubbornness, deserves to be celebrated a little.

If you're someone who loves memoirs that don't flinch — books like Educated, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, or Born a Crime — I think this one will sit close to your heart. And if you've ever needed proof that where a life begins is never where it has to end, I wrote this book, in large part, for you.

Applications are open now, and spots are limited.
Apply here: GOOGLE FORM

Thank you for considering walking through this story with me before anyone else gets to. It means more than I can easily put into words — which, for a writer, is really saying something. ]]>

The Four Quiet Thieves That Steal a Dream Before It Starts (And How I Caught Each One) By Lukonge Achilles Musaasizi

Lukonge Achilees — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 handed at birth, and I hadn't been one of them. I carried that story about myself for a long time, right through the hardest stretch of my education, until I finally got tired of carrying it and set it down.

What I discovered, once I started paying attention, is that motivation rarely dies all at once. It gets picked off, quietly, by four thieves — and once you learn to spot them, you can start locking the door before they walk in.

The thief who tells you to wait until you feel ready
I used to believe confidence had to arrive first, before I was allowed to try. It doesn't work that way. Confidence is what shows up after you've already taken the step you were afraid of, not before. I stopped waiting to feel ready and started engaging with people, with opportunities, with rooms I would once have quietly avoided. By the end of secondary school, I had more friends, more chances, and more belief in myself than the boy who kept waiting ever could have earned.

The thief who wants everything to happen fast
We live inside a world built for instant results, and that world will happily convince you that if progress isn't visible within a few weeks, the whole effort was a waste. I have watched that impatience kill more dreams than almost anything else. Nothing I have ever built — not an education, not a career, not an organization — arrived on a fast timeline. It arrived because I kept showing up long after the excitement of starting had worn off.

The thief who never learned the word 'no'

For a long time, I said yes to everything and everyone, and my own list of priorities paid the price. Learning to say no — to the things that don't serve the dream, to the people who drain the hours meant for building something — freed up exactly the space I needed to focus on the work that actually mattered. Control over your own time is not selfish. It is the foundation everything else gets built on.

The thief who never lets you make a plan
My teachers drilled SMART goals into us — specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timely — and I dismissed it as a classroom exercise for years before I understood it was one of the sturdiest tools I would ever own. A dream without a structure underneath it is just a wish. Give it a shape, a timeline, a next step you can actually take this week, and it stops being something you talk about and starts being something you do.

I am not telling you that doubt disappears once you know its tricks. It doesn't. I still feel it. What changes is that you stop mistaking the thief's voice for the truth. You learn to recognize impatience, or a fear of starting, or an unstructured wish, for exactly what it is — a pattern, not a verdict on who you are.

Nothing, in the end, works without passion sitting underneath all four of these lessons. What makes you get up in the morning? What is the one thing you would feel you truly could not live without? Find that, and the four thieves lose most of their power over you.
I built my own path — through a childhood that gave me very little reason to expect it, into a career spent trying to give other people the chances I once needed myself — by learning, slowly, to stop waiting, stop rushing, stop over-committing, and start planning. If you're standing at the edge of something today, unsure whether you're actually capable of it, I promise you the capability was never the missing piece. The four thieves were just standing in front of it.

This is one of the life lessons at the heart of my memoir, The Dream From Dust: A Memoir of Triumph Against All Odds, releasing February 2027 and available for pre-order now on Amazon. If this resonated with you, I'd love for you to follow along as I share more of the story behind it.

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The Trees That Raised Me: Behind the Scenes of Chapter 7, "The Dream Begins at Home"

Lukonge Achilees — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Behind-the-scenes stories from the writing of The Dream From Dust: A Memoir of Triumph Against All Odds, published two times a week for readers who want the story behind the story.

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.

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Author Interview: Author of The Dream From Dust: A Memoir of Triumph Against All Odds

Lukonge Achilees — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 child, for persons with disabilities, and for anyone the world has quietly decided to stop paying attention to. I founded Give a Hand to the Poor Arch Foundation (GIHPAF) and The Dream Academy to try to close that gap in some small way.

Outside of work, I'm happiest with a book in my hand. I read constantly, and when I'm not reading, I'm usually writing something — books, blog posts, whatever wants to get out of my head that day. I unwind with meditation music and slow jams, the kind of sound that lets your mind actually rest. I love a good film, especially anything adapted from a true story, along with drama, romance, thrillers, and the occasional horror when I'm feeling brave. Social networking is a genuine joy for me too — I love hearing other people's stories almost as much as I love telling my own. And whenever I can, I travel, mostly just to be near nature — to listen to birdsong, to stand somewhere quiet, and to remember how small and how lucky I am. But at the center of all of it is family. Nothing recharges me the way time with the people I love does.

2. When and why did you start writing books?

I started writing long before I called myself a writer. As a boy, I was the kind of child who noticed everything and forgot very little, and eventually all of that noticing needed somewhere to go. But the real turning point came later, when I realized that my mother — who lived through the 1978–79 Uganda–Tanzania War and carried every detail of it in her memory — would not be here forever, and neither would the stories she alone could tell. I understood, almost with a kind of panic, that if I didn't write them down, they would simply disappear with her. That's really where it began: not ambition, but urgency. I published my first book, a parenting guide, in 2018, but The Dream From Dust is the book that started it all in my heart, long before it ever reached the page.

3. What made you decide to tackle writing as a career?

Honestly, I didn't choose writing so much as writing chose me and simply refused to let go. I spent years working directly with teenage mothers, orphaned children, and persons living with HIV in the fishing communities along Lake Victoria, and I kept running into the same problem: the statistics and the case files could never hold the whole truth of what these lives actually contained. Somewhere along the way, I realized that storytelling was doing work that policy reports alone could never do — it was making people feel something, and feeling is very often the first step toward change. Writing became a natural extension of the same mission that built GIHPAF and The Dream Academy. I'm not just trying to sell books. I'm trying to make sure certain stories — my family's, and the families I've served — don't vanish the way so many stories from places like mine tend to.

4. Which one of your books or characters is your favourite?

That's a little like asking a parent to name a favourite child, but if I'm honest, it's my mother, as she appears in The Dream From Dust. I spent months coaxing her story out of her, sitting with her under an avocado tree while she told my siblings and me, in her own words, what it was like to survive a war with three children strapped to her body and a bicycle as her only real defence. Writing her into the book — her courage, her quiet strategic mind, the way she used silence itself as a kind of weapon — is the achievement I'm proudest of in anything I've written. She never set out to be a character in a book. She just lived a life worth one.

5. Which one of your books was the hardest to write and stretched you the most as a writer?

Without question, The Dream From Dust. There is a particular kind of difficulty in writing about your own father's alcoholism, and then, partway through the writing itself, having to write about his death. I lost my father, Deogracious Kaggwa, in October 2021, and there were entire weeks where I could not physically make myself return to the chapters about him. Grief has a way of rewriting your relationship to your own memories, even the ones you thought you'd already made peace with. I had to learn how to be honest about the harm he caused without erasing the very real love underneath it — and I had to do that while still actively grieving him. It stretched me in ways no craft book ever could have prepared me for. I don't think I came out the other side of that manuscript as the same writer, or the same son, who went in.

6. Who is your favourite author and book?

I find myself returning again and again to memoirists who managed to write about pain without ever asking the reader for pity — Tara Westover's Educated, William Kamkwamba's The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, and Trevor Noah's Born a Crime are the three that shaped how I eventually approached my own story. Each of those books taught me something different: Westover taught me how to write about family without flattening anyone into a villain; Kamkwamba taught me that ingenuity born of poverty deserves to be treated as genuine brilliance, not a footnote; and Noah taught me that even the hardest material can, and sometimes should, make you laugh. If I had to pick just one, I'd probably say Educated, if only because I've reread it more times than any other book on my shelf.

7. What book are you reading right now?

At the moment I'm splitting my time between two very different kinds of reading. For pleasure, I'm rereading Born a Crime, partly for comfort and partly because I'm always studying how Noah balances humour against genuinely painful material — it's a skill I'm still trying to sharpen in my own work. For research, I'm deep in materials on Uganda's political history as I prepare the next instalment in my Blurred Light From the West series, tracing the threads between the past I wrote about in Regression of Democracy in Uganda and the headlines I'm watching unfold in the country today.

8. Where do you get your inspiration for your books?

Almost entirely from life — mine, my family's, and the lives of the people I've had the privilege of serving through my humanitarian work. My childhood in Kisaka village gave me more material than I could exhaust in ten books: my father's alcoholism and eventual redemption, my mother's wartime survival, jiggers infestations that nearly ended my education before it began, a wrongful custody ordeal that could have derailed everything. My professional life adds to that well constantly — every teenage mother, every orphaned child, every person living with HIV in the fishing villages I've worked in has taught me something about resilience that I didn't know before I met them. I also draw heavily from Uganda's political and historical record, because I don't think you can really understand any one family's suffering without understanding the larger forces pressing down on it. Dust, to me, isn't just where my story starts. It's the raw material for almost everything I write.

9. What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

Spare time is precious, so I try to spend it on things that actually refill me rather than drain me further. Reading is at the top of that list, always. I also love slipping into a good film — especially anything based on a true story, along with drama, romance, thrillers, and the occasional horror film when I want my heart racing for reasons that have nothing to do with deadlines. I meditate often, usually with slow jams or ambient music playing quietly in the background, just to let my mind settle. Travel is another great love of mine, mostly so I can be near nature — I could listen to birdsong for hours, and there's something about standing in an open, wild place that reminds me why I do the work I do in the first place. And of course, there's social networking — I genuinely enjoy connecting with readers and fellow writers online. But above everything else, I treasure time with my family. That's where I feel most like myself.

10. Do you have any new books in the works?

Yes, and I'm genuinely excited about this one. My memoir, The Dream From Dust: A Memoir of Triumph Against All Odds, is set for release in February 2027, and it's available for pre-order right now on Amazon. It's the most personal thing I've ever written — the story of surviving a childhood shaped by poverty, an alcoholic father, and the long shadow of a war my mother lived through, and of building, out of all of that dust, a life devoted to giving other children the chances I nearly didn't get. Beyond that, I'm already working on the next chapter of my Blurred Light From the West true-crime series, continuing the historical thread I began in A Breath of Life and Hope of Light and carried through The Fruits of Power and Regression of Democracy in Uganda. There's a great deal more story left in me yet, and I hope you'll come along for it.

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The Tears She Thought No One Saw: A memoir excerpt and reflection from The Dream From Dust Chapter 2

Lukonge Achilees — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 description of something I feel in my chest when I think about her — a weight that belongs to her but that she somehow transferred to me through years of watching her carry it alone. I did not ask for it. She did not intend to give it. But it passed between us the way so many things pass between mothers and the children who are most like them — silently, completely, without ceremony.

She once said I was her most like her. The politeness. The passion. The quietness. The way of turning inward when the world got loud.

I fell asleep once with my head in her lap. She sat quietly, her hand moving through my hair. I was exhausted — the exhaustion of a boy who had started trying to be a man before he had the equipment for it. And in that exhaustion, unexpectedly, tears came. My eyes were closed. The tears ran anyway. They dropped on my folded knees and soaked into her Gomesi.

She did not stop the caresses. She did not ask what was wrong. She already knew. Her fingers kept moving through my hair, and she did not say a single word, and it was the most completely understood I have ever felt in my life.

I have been trying, in various ways, to describe what she gave me ever since.

Possessions meant little to her. There was one exception: the rosary, the Bible, the prayers. These she kept always. These she turned to with the regularity of breathing.
She did not receive a formal education. She read English with difficulty, if at all. But she could assemble phrases in her local language with the precision of a trained writer — fairy tales, memories, moral instruction — and store them in a mind that retained everything it touched.

I inherited this from her, I think. The ability to watch and absorb and keep. The capacity for language that is not decoration but necessity.

What I have done with those inherited gifts — and what nearly prevented me from doing anything with them at all — is the story that I have spent years trying to find the right words for.

I have found them now. Or most of them.
There is one part of the story that the blog cannot hold. One thing that happened — that I cannot finish telling here — that is the reason the book exists.

A mother who fed others before her own family. A father who could fix anything except himself. A boy between them, watching everything, understanding too much too early. What that boy did next — the choice that changed the direction of his life — is where The Dream From Dust begins in earnest. The book tells what the blog cannot. Grab your own copy.

— Lukonge M Achilees-
Author of The Dream From Dust ]]>

What She Grew and What She Gave Away: A memoir excerpt and reflection from The Dream From Dust Chapter 2

Lukonge Achilees — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 giving woman, the saint of the village. I want to resist that framing, because it softens something that was actually quite radical. She was not generous the way people with surplus are generous. She gave from the portion that was ours. She gave before she kept. She structured the household so that the first claim on its output was the community's, not the family's.

There was a network of these women — the informal mutual aid group called Muno Mukabi — who operated across the village, feeding the deceased family's mourners, feeding the homeless, maintaining the minimum threshold of dignity that a village requires to keep functioning. My mother was a node in that network. She did not think of it as sacrifice. She thought of it as normal. As what you do.

I think about the economics of that now, as an adult who has lived in cities and read books about development and community resilience. I think about what it takes to maintain a functioning social fabric in conditions of extreme material scarcity, who does that work, and what it costs the people who do it. It costs the mothers. It costs the women. It costs the Rosemarys.

She never once complained. This is not me mythologising her. I am reporting what I observed over many years of careful watching. She never showed irritation. She never showed resentment. She served with what I can only call a terrifying consistency — the consistency of a person who has decided, at some foundational level, that this is what their life is for, and has made peace with that decision.

The Born-Again Preachers and the One Mistake
She had a rigidity in her, too. I would be lying if I left it out.
She was a staunch Catholic — fiercely, sometimes unforgivingly so. When the born-again Pentecostal movement began reaching into the corners of Uganda in the early 2000s, and a group came to pray for our family, she did not welcome them. When my brother Julius and my sister Doreen joined a compassion programme run by that religious group — one that offered poor children access to education — my mother's discomfort was such that Julius was pressured to withdraw. Doreen left too.

My uncle Mutawe stayed. He was the one my mother had once fed and sheltered and cared for. He stayed with the compassion programme, which took him further in education, which set him on a path to become one of the most successful men in our village, running charitable organisations — the Rakai Orphans Development Initiative, later rebranded to Act International Mission — that have done more good for that community than I can summarise here.

My brother Julius, who left the programme, became a drunkard for years. He was shot by thieves on a dark Kampala road while riding his Boda Boda — the bullet pierced his lower right abdomen and should have killed him. He survived. He eventually found the faith he had been denied permission to seek, and is better now.

My mother knows this. She no longer holds the rigidity she held then. The world moved and she moved with it, in her own time, in her own way.
But those two children — Julius and Doreen — were denied their chance at education by a decision made in faith. That is the one thing, in a life of extraordinary service, that I believe she would undo if she could.

I am not writing this to punish her. I am writing it because a true portrait includes the shadow. She was not a saint. She was a person — brilliant, devoted, fierce, loving, and wrong once, in a way that had consequences. That makes her real. That makes her worth writing about.

A mother who fed others before her own family. A father who could fix anything except himself. A boy between them, watching everything, understanding too much too early. What that boy did next — the choice that changed the direction of his life — is where The Dream From Dust begins in earnest. The book tells what the blog cannot. Grab your own copy

— Lukonge M Achilees-
Author of The Dream From Dust

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The Gomesi and the Rosary: A memoir excerpt and reflection from The Dream From Dust Chapter 2

Lukonge Achilees — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 one that tells you everything you need to know about Rosemary Nakayemba:

She was not cooking for her family. Not yet. She was cooking for the hungry people of the neighbourhood first. Our family would not eat until the food had been delivered — until I had carried the plates to wherever the poor of the village were sitting together in the evening for their only meal of the day. That was the sequence. That was the rule, unspoken and absolute.

I do not know when I first understood that this was unusual. Probably quite late. When you grow up watching something, it takes years to understand that the rest of the world does not operate the same way.

The Gomesi and the Rosary
When I picture my mother at prayer, I see her standing next to our beds late at night. We would be — or appear to be — asleep. She would not know I was watching. She wore her large traditional cloth, the Gomesi, and she held the rosary that she carried everywhere. Her lips moved. No sound came out. Her face had an expression that I have never seen on any other human face, before or since — focused, peaceful, and devastated all at once.
I would lie there with my eyes half-closed and watch her and try not to move, because I did not want to interrupt what she was doing and I did not want her to know that I knew she was doing it. There was something private in it that deserved to remain private. This was not a performance of faith. This was a conversation she was having with something she genuinely believed was listening.

I would sometimes cry, watching her. Not from sadness. From something harder to name — the feeling of witnessing a person giving everything they have, quietly, in the dark, without an audience, without a return.

She looked more beautiful at prayer than at any other time. That is simply true, and I am not sure how to explain it except to say that what I was seeing was a person who had found the place where their full self lived, and was living there completely, for those few minutes, before returning to the demands of the morning.

The Other Days of my father: A memoir excerpt and reflection from The Dream From Dust Chapter 2

Lukonge Achilees — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 point. The point is what the other days did to the space around them. How they changed the texture of the house. How they meant that you learned, very early, to read the morning before you entered a room. To listen at the door. To assess, in the first seconds of seeing someone, which version of them you were going to be dealing with today.

This is a specific kind of intelligence that children who grow up in uncertain households develop. It is extremely useful and it costs a great deal. It means you are always slightly on alert. It means the baseline state of your nervous system is watchfulness rather than ease. It means you become very good at anticipating what other people need and very bad at simply existing in a moment without calculating it.

I am still, decades later, working on that last part.

What the Village Said About the Kaggwas
People in Kisaka used to say that the people from my father's family were wise.
I heard this my whole childhood and it sat strangely with me, because the evidence of that wisdom was not always obvious. My father was wise, yes — and also unreliable. Brilliant — and also absent. Full of knowledge — and also, in ways I only began to understand as an adult, full of pain.

What I understand now is that wisdom and damage are not opposites. That a person can carry extraordinary knowledge and extraordinary pain in the same body, and that sometimes the pain is the price of the knowledge, and sometimes the knowledge is the thing that makes the pain survivable.

My father survived. So did I. We did it differently, with different tools, with different costs.
I took his English. I took his way of looking at things — the mechanic's disposition, the analyst's eye. I took the conviction that anything broken could, in principle, be understood and repaired. I took his love of language.

What I left behind, or tried to, was the other thing. The inherited darkness. The pattern that a child absorbs before they have the words to name what they are absorbing, and that sits in the body for years, waiting.

I was twenty-something years old before I fully understood what I had taken from him and what I had decided to refuse. By then, something had already happened — something I could not have anticipated, could not have prevented, and that changed the direction of everything.

I am not ready to tell you what it was. Not yet.

What I can tell you is this: my father walked out every morning at five, on the good days, to check on the coffee and banana plantations. He walked the quiet paths before the day made its demands. He loved those paths. I know this the way I know things about people I have watched carefully for a long time — not because he said it, but because of the way the tension left his shoulders when he was heading toward the trees.

I think about that sometimes. The thing that gave him peace. The plantations and the early light and the paths nobody else was on yet.

I wonder if he knew how much I was watching him. I wonder if he knew what I was learning.
I wonder if he knew, in those five-in-the-morning moments, that he was teaching me something about survival — about the necessity of having a quiet place to walk toward, before the day begins its demands — that I would carry forward long after everything else between us had been resolved, or left unresolved, or simply set down and walked away from.

A son watches his father for clues about who to become. Sometimes the clues are gifts. Sometimes they are warnings. What happened between Achilles and Deogracious Kaggwa — the full weight of what was passed down and what was refused — is the story The Dream From Dust has been building toward. Grab your own copy.

— Lukonge M Achilees-
Author of The Dream From Dust

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The English He Loved: A memoir excerpt and reflection from The Dream From Dust Chapter 2

Lukonge Achilees — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 a teacher and an absence, sometimes all in the same week, and I have spent my adult life trying to hold all of those things at once without letting any one of them cancel the others out.

I have not always succeeded. But I keep trying.

The Radio Boxes and the Tool Drawers
In 1999, when I was six years old, the thing I remember most clearly about our four-room mud house was the corner of the dining room.

There was an old, large wooden radio cassette in that corner — the kind with four stands, a significant object, a presence. Around it, everywhere: old radios, spare parts, tool boxes. Suckers. Solder pumps. Nails. Wires. Tapes. Motherboards. Screwdrivers. The smell of electronics and oil and something metallic that I have never been able to name.
My father could fix anything.

This is not a son's exaggeration. He was the best bicycle repairman in our village — a distinction that mattered more than it might sound, because bicycles were primary transport and primary livelihood, and the person who could make them run again was, in a real and practical sense, keeping people's lives running. He repaired radios. He did electrical work. He was a gardener, a motorcycle mechanic, a hunter, a beekeeper, a fisherman, a house builder. He had been village chairperson. He had taught English.
The range of it was extraordinary. Here was a man who had built the internal architecture of himself — skill after skill, acquired through observation and practice and a refusal to accept that anything was beyond his understanding — in a village that offered no formal apprenticeships, no trade schools, no infrastructure for that kind of accumulation.
He built it anyway.

I was watching. I was always watching.

The English He Loved
My father had formal education, more than most in Kisaka. He loved to communicate with us in English — not as performance, but as commitment. He liked hard grammar. He liked precise language. He believed that the right words, put in the right order, could do things that no other tool could do.

This was not a small thing to give a child.

Because what it gave me, before I had any other resource, was the conviction that language was power — that the way you assembled words was not decoration but architecture, and that architecture could hold things up or let them fall depending on how carefully you built it. I did not know yet what I would build with that conviction. But the conviction itself was already forming, in the dining room with the radio parts and the tool boxes, listening to my father speak with the care of a man who understood that words were the most precise instruments he owned.

He never acquired much wealth. This is simply true and I say it without judgment. A man can be a genius and still not convert that genius into the kind of material security that the world measures genius by. My father was one of those men. The tools and the knowledge and the English and the chairmanship and the twenty different occupations — none of it produced the thing the world calls success.

It produced me instead. I am trying to decide how I feel about that.

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Mr. Livinaari — The One Exception: A memoir excerpt and reflection from The Dream From Dust Chapter 2

Lukonge Achilees — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 plantation. When he hosted weddings and introduction parties for his sons and daughters, thousands of people came — from miles and miles, people who had not eaten meat or chicken or anything beyond the cycle of porridge and posho for months or years. They came, and they ate, and for one day the cycle was different.

I have thought about Mr. Livinaari many times as an adult. About what it means to have more than others and to use it the way he did — not as insulation from the village but as participation in it. About how rare that is. About how one person who opens the gate, metaphorically and literally, can become the organizing memory of an entire childhood.
He is still in my memory. I think he always will be.

The Current That Ran Beneath the Quiet
Do not mistake the gentleness of the people of my village for contentment.
Beneath the deceptive peace, there were strong currents of fear and anxiety. The fear of the next drought. The fear of HIV, which had moved through this region for decades like a slow tide, taking fathers and mothers and leaving children without the architecture of their lives. The fear that the balance, already so heavily weighted down on one side, would shift further.

We lived by making as few demands as possible. We were not outgoing. We pushed aside intrusions. We protected the small, fragile equilibrium we had because to step outside it — to reach for something beyond what was given — was, for most people, to risk losing the little that remained.

I knew this. I felt it in the village the way you feel weather coming before it arrives. And I also knew, from the time I was very young, that something in me was going to push against it.
I did not know yet what that would cost.

I was a strange child in Kisaka. I knew it and the village knew it. I hung around with people older than me. I observed everything. I was, as my father would put it in his careful English — the language he used when he wanted to say something that mattered — analytical. Different. Difficult to get along with, sometimes, because everything had to make sense before I would agree to do it.

People in my family said the Kaggwas were wise. I spent years trying to understand what they meant by that. I understand it better now. What they were describing, I think, was a particular heaviness of mind — the kind that sees too much, too early, and cannot stop seeing.

That mind was a gift. It was also a weight I would spend my entire childhood learning to carry.

And what I was carrying it toward — the thing that was waiting at the end of the road I could not yet name — was shaped, more than anything else, by two people.
One of them was my father.

The village made me careful. My father made me something else entirely — something I am still in the process of understanding. What Deogracious Kaggwa gave his son, and what he withheld, and what the space between those two things produced — that is the story The Dream From Dust tells in full. Get your copy now

— Lukonge M Achilees-
Author of The Dream From Dust

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The Village Sky and What It Did to People: A memoir excerpt and reflection from The Dream From Dust Chapter 2

Lukonge Achilees — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 was a presence. It had weight and texture and a particular sound — the sound of women carrying water on their heads from miles away, the sound of a drum beating communication across hills where there were no telephones, the sound of a community sitting together in heavy silence around a mother whose baby had not made it through the night. Absorbing the pain. Folding it, slowly, into the stream of life.

What the outside world calls poverty, we called Tuesday.

I have spent years in cities since then, and I notice that people in cities do not look at each other this way. They look at the edges of each other — the clothing, the phone, the neighbourhood, the accent. They locate each other by coordinates rather than by contact. It is more efficient, perhaps. It is also lonelier than anything I experienced in Kisaka, and I grew up in a village where the nearest hospital was hours away and malaria killed babies every season.

The people of my village were not gentle because life was easy. They were gentle because the sky had taken the non-essential out of them, and what remained was mostly human.

The village made me careful. My father made me something else entirely — something I am still in the process of understanding. What Deogracious Kaggwa gave his son, and what he withheld, and what the space between those two things produced — that is the story The Dream From Dust tells in full. Coming soon.

— Lukonge M Achilees-
Author of The Dream From Dust

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Growing Up Under the Mechanic's Shadow: A memoir excerpt and reflection from The Dream From Dust Chapter 1

Lukonge Achilees — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 of the actual experience, and I have decided that the actual experience is what I owe the reader.

Because here is what I know: the people who grew up in houses like mine, who survived jiggers and cold floors and shared bark cloth blankets and toilets half a kilometre away in the dark — those people did not survive in spite of those conditions. They survived because of the specific hardness that those conditions created in them. A hardness that is not cruelty. It is more like density. Like something that has been compressed by difficulty until it cannot be compressed further.

I carry that density now. I have carried it everywhere I have gone. And there are moments — in offices, in meetings, in situations that present themselves as difficult and ask whether you will fold — when I feel it, and I am grateful for it. Even now. Even after everything.

Growing Up Under the Mechanic's Shadow

My father was a mechanic. He worked on machines for a living, alongside farming. He was good with engines — the way a thing works, the way its parts relate to each other, the way a broken thing can sometimes be made to run again. I inherited something of this disposition, I think, though it expresses itself differently in me.

But my father carried his own damage, and he carried it in ways that sometimes spilled onto the people around him. Growing up under that shadow — the unpredictability of it, the narcissism, the moments of rage — was its own education. It taught me what I did not want to become. It taught me the difference between a man who repairs things and a man who breaks them. It taught me, slowly and painfully, that being someone's child does not require you to repeat their story.

That understanding did not come early. It came the hard way.

I am writing this because I want you to understand something about the house before I tell you what the house eventually made possible.

The house is where I became who I am. Not in the triumphant sense, not in the sense of some clean motivational arc where the poverty is simply the setup and the success is the inevitable punchline. It is more complicated than that, and less linear. The house shaped me in ways I am still discovering — ways that sometimes feel like gifts and sometimes feel like wounds that have closed but not quite healed.

What I know is this: there came a point when everything about that house, everything about Kisaka, everything about the particular life I had lived in that particular compound, pushed me toward something. A decision. A direction. A dream that I did not yet have words for but could feel the shape of, the way you feel the edge of something in the dark before you can see it.

I was about to begin moving toward it.
But before I could, something happened that nearly stopped everything.

The house gave me everything it had to give. What happened next — the moment that nearly broke the story before it could be told — is the turn that The Dream From Dust has been building toward. The book tells what the blog posts cannot. Find out where the journey leads. Grab your own copy.

— Lukonge M Achilees-
Author of The Dream From Dust ]]>

What I Remember When I Close My Eyes: A memoir excerpt and reflection from The Dream From Dust Chapter 1

Lukonge Achilees — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

What It Means to Be Called 'Polite Baby: A memoir excerpt and reflection from The Dream From Dust Chapter 1

Lukonge Achilees — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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 made of the same material as me. She was saying: you come from somewhere specific. She was saying: know where you come from, because it will explain many things about who you are.
I am still learning what she meant.

I know now that the politeness she saw in me was also a kind of armour. That the introversion was also a survival strategy developed by a child in a loud, overcrowded, sometimes frightening house. That the care I felt for people around me — and still feel — was partly the care of someone who grew up watching a woman give everything she had and then find a little more.

I know that I learned what love looks like from a woman who demonstrated it mostly through action and endurance, who rarely said the word but showed it every single day in the smoke and the silence and the prayers.

The Night My Father Tried to End It Before It Started
I was told this story by a sister, one night, in the specific darkness that exists in those hours when people finally say the things they have been carrying.

The month before I was born, my father came home drunk. He beat my mother. This was not, I understand now, the first time. She was eight months pregnant with me. And as he struck her, as she fell to her knees trying to protect the child she was carrying — trying to protect me — he screamed that he would beat until what was inside her was gone.
I have sat with this story for a long time. I have tried to find the clean feeling about it, the resolved feeling, the feeling that says: I have processed this and put it away.
I have not found that feeling. I am not sure it exists.

What I have found instead is this: my mother knelt on the floor and prayed, and I arrived two months later, and here I am. That is the thread the story has. It does not make the violence acceptable. It does not answer the question of what a child is supposed to do with the knowledge that his entry into the world was contested so violently. But it does say something about survival — about the particular, stubborn, unremarkable-looking form that survival can take.

A woman on her knees. Refusing to let go.

I am writing this memoir because I believe that the stories we do not tell are the ones that go on doing damage in the dark. I am writing it because my mother deserves to have someone bear witness to who she was and what she did. I am writing it because I was that baby on the mat, and I came back, and it turns out there was a reason — though it took me many more years and many more close calls to begin to understand what it was.
But understanding did not come quickly. And it did not come easily.
What came next — the years that tested whether the miracle of my survival would amount to anything — is where the real story begins.

The boy survived. But survival, it turns out, is only the first chapter. What the years ahead held — the school, the struggle, the wilderness of growing up with a father who carried his own damage, and the slow, impossible work of becoming someone — is the story that The Dream From Dust tells in full. Get your copy and find out what happened next.

— Lukonge Achilles Musaasizi
Author of The Dream From Dust

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