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Tribute to Ngyendo this Easter

Last year in February, my partner, his brother and I went home for a weekend of rest and family love. We found that my sister's dog had had puppies, and they looked so cute all huddled up together. She said we could have one. I had never had a dog my entire life, my sister has had all the pets at home. When we were leaving after the blissful weekend, we decided to choose and take one puppy. There was one brown one that kept circling around my feet, rubbing his belly on my foot. We decided on that one. Our journey was long, stopping in Bushenyi and then moving on to Kampala. We had carried some milk for the puppy but still this was his first time to not be next to his mother and to travel anywhere. But he was a resilient little fella. He madeit  home alive. Mom kept asking about him and we were just super excited to care for another life. Our whole routine changed. After soliciting for names on facebook and elsewhere and not really liking any, we decided to name him Ngyendo, whi...
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When the dead help with fiction.

So most of March I was thinking about my grandmother Nyamwire, my dad's mom. Considering she's been dead for a long time, some of my uncles freaked out when I told them she was visiting me in my dreams. I was told to go and pray, blah, blah, blah. To which I replied that I'm trying to decolonise my mind and to stop listening to the demonising of everything traditionally African. Before colonialists arrived, I told them, our religion depended highly on contact with the dead. One of my uncles was so shocked by all this that he just changed the subject. But a cousin of mine was very intrigued and she told me to keep listening and see if maybe grandma had a message for us. A week later I went on a writing retreat in Lira and embarked on my first feature film. There is a character in the story who's the backbone of the protagonist and a symbol of love and protection. I was struggling so much with her back story because she's a Munyankore woman who lives in Buganda. I di...
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Entry 5

My friend Kart and I are in a park, with many other people. We're watching her son who's playing with fellow boys his age. The park is surrounded by forest on each side. A few hours into the day, someone from the family of Kart's son's father shows up to check on him. He says he wants to take some pictures with the boy, and he does. Then I ask Kart to join them so I can take pictures of them all together. At first my phone camera is working but branches and other things are blocking my view, and I'm unable to capture their faces properly. So I change position and move at the edge of the park, next to the forest, to get a better angle. My phone camera seems to have a problem because every image now turns out to be an extreme closeup of an arm or a flower or something. I'm unable to frame a picture where the three of them are properly seen, even if they're actually making effort to pause in such great ways. Then suddenly I hear something moving moving next ...
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Entry 4

We're going swimming with my family. I can't seem to find what to wear, but finally I realize I'm wearing a really cool two piece, so I throw on a random dress, satisfied with what's underneath. There's supposed to be some cute boys where we're going. We arrive at the area, and it's a lake or a pond or something like that. It's not a typical swimming pool. My siblings jump in but my Lil brother decides to fish. While he's fishing, he catches some snakes and throws them back in. To him, it's just other organisms living in the water. To me, it's the absolute nightmare. How can anyone go into this water? Don't they know they could get in contact with these snakes? A feeling of extreme fear washes over me. I can't swim! Not in this place! I stay with this numbing feeling for a while, then the place slowly dissolves out of memory. We're at a picnic. We're couples, some older and some a little young. My partner and I are one of th...
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Dream journal; entry 3

Instead of grad school, I reenroll back in highschool. I'm adorned in full uniform, black shoes, white socks, skirt, shirt sweater and all. There's a disturbing feeling in my gut, that I'm not doing this for me, that I want to redo highschool to please people at home, so I can do a university program they approve of. I want to do it 'right's this time and even show up for graduation like all normal students. It's boarding school and I'm fully equipped with everything including a click of friends. We're ready to go for lunch, or is it dinner or something? I can't quite tell. We seem to have everything butbone; confidence. We follow other students to the lunch counter, and then we realize that students are stealing food which is meant for students with special needs. Should we stay in the queue and steal the food as well, or should we wait for the kitchen staff to serve us posho and beans?
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Dream journal, entry 2; Half a Dream

Ugandan women, or rather, women of Ugandan origin living in the UK have been found after years of going missing. They each have two babies. Their captor was using them for procreation. I can't remember the rest. Apparently there's dream filters? Another half dream, the next day; I woke up at around 4am after dreaming that I was hiding from someone or something and had been living in the back of a truck and later in the basement of a stranger. I even dug a hole in the ground to jump into when visitors came. But everywhere seemed so risky and public transport was a nightmare because anybody could recognise me and I needed to not be recognized At one point someone offered to fly me out of the bush hideout in a mini boat plane which didn't look so safe. It was blue and looked like a kid's toy. There were heavy emotions and lots of things at stake that I can't remember. I just know I was scared. And I was looking for help. And once in a while somebody helped, but ...
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Digital dream journal: entry one.

We're digging through dark brown soil, my friends and I. I can't recognize any of them. But it didn't seem to matter, I knew them, in the garden. It is a valley of sorts, and the bush has been cleared and burnt so that fresh grass is beginning to grow and a few trees still lie on the ground, half burnt. The topic is killers, especially rebel killers. We're somewhere far but someone knows a girl killer from my home country, and the girls are engaged in talking about her and her crimes. I don't remember her. I don't know her. I feel inadequate and not so well-read because I should know any rebel leaders from my country, especially female ones. That's the sort of thing that should interest me. I admit to my friends that I don't know this girl. Someone mentions that she killed most of her victims in 88, the year I was born. I'm a bit relieved, because somehow knowing I wasn't born or was just an infant means I can get away with not knowing about thi...
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