Sunday 27 April 2014

No matter what yo not good at, your dreams are as valid as ever!





I remember somewhere in Primary 1 at Uganda Railways Primary School Nsambya (not sure the school exists anymore) my teacher of English was praising my progress in the subject when her Maths counterpart a one Ms Musisi (I hope it is not the KCCA boss) rubbished her on grounds that my Mathematics was wanting.

Sometime in Senior 3 at Ntare School a teacher in the Chemistry lab saw my unsuccessful attempts to draw a beaker or whatever name it went by, (those glass containers in Chemwa where colours were mixed then through tubes bla bla) and assured me how I would never be a scientist (and in that school such was a huge insult).

Music and Literature were always second nature to me but never measured up as brainy quests. It was better for one to ace the science subjects and do okay in the humanities than the reverse.

As the seers would have it, I never really aced Maths or Chemistry; I had trouble remembering all the valences of all elements under the sun, making sure equations balanced with letters of the alphabet, numerals above and below them. Those short numbers in Math’s paper Section A, were just too impossible. I just managed to survive the system I would admit.

I would perhaps had been most confident on stage, in the music room, any type of aesthetic theatre or recital; a magazine editorial or novel tour but not mixing colours and hoping the blue turns pink but not too much pink and that X and Y persist to the last part of the dy dx trajectory.


Do I sound like R. Kelly? Not really, Can I ace a Beethoven symphony? Naaaaaaay, Do I think I could succeed Shakespeare? Dude, who does that? …and the scales tip some more, and yet some more.

Somewhere deep in Rukungiri, a not really schooled woman (mother of a childhood friend) always told her kids that I would be a lawyer (although I actually found this out much later and she died before I could ask why she presumed thus. R.I.P)

I kinda detested the learned profession for no justifiable reason and so had never really striven for it by any scintilla of ambition. I was sure I would do something big with my life somehow but I could not quite put a finger to what. (Have I yet anyway? I cannot say).

There are that many things in life that are always blurred and perhaps even for too long. I have probably forgotten 90% percent of what I studied in the Chemistry lab and my appreciation of numbers has not necessarily improved but none of that marinates my waking moments that much.

#As Lupita would say, no matter where you are from…blab bla bla…. and as I might add, no matter what you are not good at, your dreams are as valid as they have ever been.

Onward marching, dreamy soldiers…
$TOH
twitter @matsikogodwin

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