Positive Parenting

By Dickson Tumuramye When the president announced the first 14 days of total lockdown, I had written about readjusting our budgets and controlling our expenses since we wouldn't be sure what will happen thereafter. Upon completing the 14 days on April 14th, 2020, our president (Uganda) again extended the lockdown to more 21 days up to May 5th, 2020. That makes a total of 35 days or more than a month on top of the previous days that some people had already spent just at home with their families. This is a rare case for many to be at home with such an unplanned long time. It's sometimes hard to get such time once for leave from work. Some received the first 14 days with joy and others with sadness depending on what they were to use those days for. Whichever way you spent them, it's a time to do a self-audit and I ask yourself;  how have these 14 days of lockdown impacted my life? What did I use those days for? What did I benefit from them? Other than the negative si

By Dickson Tumuramye The word of God says that “the thief’s purpose is to steal and kill and destroy. My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life (John 10:10). This coronavirus pandemic is equally the same as a thief that has intentionally come to destroy nations. Many people are now at home; no work, no movement/travel, no socialization, no fellowships, which has left people in total lockdown. Life cannot remain the same where there is no income. The pleasures we like to enjoy can’t remain the same. Even some essential things to some may now look a luxury. Your usual lifestyle of hanging out with friends every evening can’t be anymore. When you would wake up in the morning without fuel, you would figure out using a taxi or bodaboda. This cannot be any more until the ban is lifted. This is not just only a healthy war but an economic one as well. This is a time to sit down with your family and rework on your budget. You can’t keep spending the same way when you are no

 Prim K. Tumuramye The year was 1999. I was 15 years of age, in Form Three. My mother was the closest and most present relation I knew in my life. Having been raised with no father, no sibling, mine was indeed a very small world. Being an only child means that you are overly protected lest anything nips your life in the bud. I was that over-protected child. I was not allowed to visit or do most of the things fellow children engaged in, just in case. I was pampered and pressurized to grow faster than my age in equal measure. That afternoon in 1999, Aunt Hope (Maama Annet Kukundakwe) came to pick me from school. I was picked from class to go and receive my message from the Headmaster’s office. Messages from headteachers were usually not good news. Even as I dragged my feet to the Headmaster’s office, I wondered why of all students I had been singled out for a message. Nonetheless, I went, for refusing to go would be a crime on its own. As I neared the Headmaster’s office, I

 Prim K. Tumuramye ‘Mummy, tonight I am the one to play the big drum!’ Deborah announced as soon as I opened my bedroom door. ‘But I thought you are the one who has been drumming these past two weeks. Why don’t you allow another person to drum?’ I ask, knowing that approving this request will cause appeals from other dissatisfied members of our household congregation. A few years back, I had bought a relatively small drum as a home artifact. The children recommended that we could get better value for money from the artifact by using it as a music instrument than a mere decoration. I obliged. Then the fights started. The struggle on who could use the small drum became common place. At the beginning of this year, when I got wind of the news that a dear friend of mine, Aunt Connie was enroute to Kampala through the Masaka Highway, I requested her to buy for me a sizable drum. Anyone that has plied the Masaka highway knows that there is a stretch that has all tribes o

Prim K. Tumuramye The unthinkable was no longer to be read about as a fairy tale. It was not something I heard or read about, not a sensational story making rounds in the age of social media – it was real. The closest I had ever come face to face with war was its spelling. Growing up, it was not unusual to hear bizarre stories about war and what it comes with. Not an experience any right-thinking member of society would ever wish to go through first-hand to understand what it means. Yet here I was, with my kith and kin, right in the middle of the war. There were no gun shots in the air, neither could you see desperate mothers fleeing for safety with their children, yet the writing was on the wall – we were in a silent but deadly war zone. The World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a global pandemic in March 2020. If our forefathers thought living to tell the story of World War I & II was heroic, here we are, in the twenty first century fighting another global war.