Mrs.O's writing room.

This pot (amoti) is the fridge in my parent’s home in Serere. It’s served faithfully since I was a little girl. I had never seen a pot so huge. I could literally hide behind it in a game of “tapo” and no one would find me. When the water levels were low, my feet dangled as I tried to scoop up a drink of water. Surprising how much it shrunk since. Once the pot is smoked, it yields the sweetest, coolest water at the perfect temperature. It’s reassuring to find it in the corner of the corridor. So much has changed and yet so much remains the same. 

He is dark, 5ft 7 inches. On most days he’ll wear a hoodie and a pair of jeans. As I watch him walk to the bus I think, there goes my baby – my Japadhola/Mufumbira/ Etesot. A Ugandan boy who holds no grudges for his ethnicity. In the world we live in, he is a “Young black man!” - not the description I would use for my son, but like the police here would say – “he fits the profile.” Can one tell that he is not an angry black man when he walks into a store with a hoodie? In moving to America I exchanged one set of issues for another.