Boulevard of uncertainty

So at 27 done with lawschool and waiting for a masters which had been offered, life had other plans. Waking up in the morning of 15th November 2016,he couldn’t turn his body and couldn’t speak, luckily he had his phone , so he called his brother and the first person they called was Dr Jennifer who suggested that they do an MRI brain scan and that was in Kampala so the journey to Kampala began they kept in contact with Dr Jennifer who wrote a scan request form and the lab was owned by the Chinese on a building next to Crested Towers ground floor,he was wheeled into the place and the attendant at the lab brought some documents for the elder brother to sign as is the practice.

So in simple speak, Mwene could not talk nor move . That was devastation, all his life,he had dreams of writing and being in the academia and was a research assistant on a PhD writing so life was being kind to him. The first months he was in self denial, he could hardly believe this was happening and so when it was decided that he comes to the rehabilitation center, he was brought amid a first setback, due to motion sickness he had to feed through a tube and it was mainly yoghurt which would be pushed down the tube.At the time his friends found out and wondered why he had been off social media. You see to some people social media is the social capital and Mwene is one such person. Friends led by Mashansha and Mugambaniguru organized for a meeting at Forest Mall Lugogo and resolved to set up a fundraiser and quite a significant sum was raised which offset most of the bills. Now a fundraiser is successful based on the cause and the people behind it. Some of the people who came on board had actually never met him,they used to read his Facebook posts and had an online character in their minds so perhaps the social capital had huge returns on investment. Mwene was a good guy but he wasn’t a saint either. To describe him, I would say,a good ambitious human who was living his life.

So suddenly his life Titanic had been hit by an iceberg of illness. What did that mean? He was literally walking on the boulevard of broken dreams and uncertainty.

Right now Mwene is 31 and still pushing on and like he says, ‘I will recover’. Now as for resilience,I guess it is a combination of factors and these are,a strong support system of family and friends. Friends who come to check on him don’t come because they are going to make him walk and talk again.They come because they want to identify with him in the journey to recovery and create a connection. Good friends may come in their free time but awesome friends free time to check on him.

Mwene resumed blogging in 2019, because literally that is his speak and he calls himself a story teller. One friend told him,’ Mwene, you are under the water but still breathing fine’. This is his story.