Tag: Dilman Dila

By Dilman Dila

December comes. We get our holidays, and I’m more excited because, as usual every end of year, my mother and I travel to the village up north in Gulu to celebrate New Year with my grandmother. The journey requires three modes of transport. First, we take a multi-terrain passenger vehicle that can travel both on water and on land, since there are too many flooded spots in the Kampala area to make it on land alone. And the flash-floods mean it is safer to use a vehicle that can quickly be transformed into a boat. In Karuma, we catch a bus to Gulu, but it is an old bus with a faulty battery, and just after setting off, though the indicator said it was 100% charged, the battery dies, leaving us stranded in the middle of the road. My mother says that back in the day when buses used fuel, they would have simply sent someone with a jerrycan to buy petrol, but now, we have to park and wait for the sun to charge the batteries. Gulu is nearby and my mother loses her patience. It’s already been eight hours since we set off. She calls one of her brothers, who comes with an electric tricycle, and within thirty minutes, just as darkness is gathering, we arrive home.

But as we enter the village, I notice a new structure. A long white wall fence, topped with barbed wire. That is totally surprising. Who would erect such a fence in a village? I see soldiers walking about on patrol, and I wonder, what is happening? Then we pass a gate, and a signpost says, Amuru Hot-Spring Swamp: Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted. Ha! Very strange indeed. I’ve played in those swamps every time I come for the December holidays, so why is it now a heavily protected area? 

Continue reading “The Mystery of the Swamp”

By Dilman Dila

It’s 1^st November 2060 and yesterday I finished my primary leaving examinations. Yay! Now, I’ll no longer be a primarian, and my elder brother is making the moment extra by taking me on my first fishing trip! Yay! I’ve grown, after all. I’m no longer a child. I made twelve this year, and next year I’ll start secondary school. The sun is almost going down when he helps me climb onto his solar-powered boat to go out on the lake. He lives in a floating village, which is composed of about fifty houses stitched together to form an island. In the past this was land, but after the big rains extended the shores of the lake, it swallowed it all up and the fishing folk had to build this village because they had no other place to go. I live with our parents on a dry suburb of Kampala, but today being the day I officially finish primary school (I know I’ll pass!), I get to sleep in this floating village, and it’s the best end of year gift a child my age can ever get. Maybe someday after I’ve grown up, I’ll take to fishing like my brother. 

I won’t have to go to school tomorrow, or the day after. Not until next year! I’ll hang out with my brother on the lake, catching Nile Perch. We sail past submerged houses from long before the big rains. They have all collapsed and their ruins stick out of the water, covered in weeds and water hyacinth, and home to frogs. We go past yellow markers that indicate the actual shores of the lake, and then we are in deep waters, where the fish live. My brother throws a scanner-drone into the water. It’s a small robot, about the size of my hand, and it goes in deep and searches for fish, mapping out the possible places the fish can be in, and then it indicates where to cast the nets. This saves a lot of time. My brother doesn’t have to stay up all night hoping to catch fish, like older fishermen who distrust technology, or those who fish for fun. The scanner is not accurate, and sometimes by the time the net is thrown in, the fish have fled, but it does help a great deal.

Continue reading “The Fisherman”

By Dilman Dila

It’s my birthday! I turn thirteen today, 6^th November 2060. Ha! My brothers and sisters wake me up just after sunrise. They sing to me and give me a cake. I blow out the candles and we laugh and eat the cake even before I brush my teeth. It’s Saturday, so we don’t have to go to school. But we have to work in our mother’s nsenene farm in the morning, preparing the cages, in which insects have been growing for the last several weeks, for harvest. It is always tricky harvesting without letting the grasshoppers escape, and we shall be at it all morning.

“After that,” my sister May says, “we’ll go explore the lights.”

My heart races. The lights are a mystery we encountered last week, as we returned from visiting a relative. They were bright, burning in the darkness like green fire, and smoke rose out of it. We stood at a hill, watching these strange lights, which were on another hill about five miles away. We know nobody lives on that hill. It’s just a bush with ruined houses, so what caused the bright light?

Continue reading “The Nsenene Farm”

By Dilman Dila

It is November 2060. I celebrated my thirteenth birthday last week, and my mum gave me a camera as a gift. I’ve always wanted a camera, a proper one with a zoom lens with which to photograph birds. I fell in love with birds since it is my mother’s job to study them. We live on a hill way outside Kampala. Mum says that mostly the rich and the politically connected people live up on hills, since low-lying areas are prone to flooding and some suburbs of Kampala like Bwaise are permanently submerged, but we can live on a hill because Mum is a biotechnologist, tasked with looking after one of the few remaining forests, and studying the birds that appear in it at certain seasons. 

Continue reading “The Return of the Migrant Stork”

By Dilman Dila

It is 2060, ten years since my mother died. I was two years old at that time and I barely remember her. I live in the water suburb of Bwaise, with my elder brother, who drives a water-taxi, and my elder sister, a student at Makerere. Our father raised us alone. He runs a profitable business, for he owns a special 3D printer that uses his own secret formula to generate synthetic timber slats for use in the construction of houses. In the submerged suburbs of Kampala, you can’t build with brick or concrete. You have to use synthetic wood, and Dad is a major supplier of this product. 

He says that when he was a little boy, Bwaise was dry. It suffered flash floods in the rainy season, but it was not permanently underwater as it is today. Back then, the government tried to contain the floods with drainage canals, and some people redesigned their houses to prevent water from entering. There was a huge campaign focused on getting people to change their lifestyles, to stop using plastic and to stop all activity on the remaining wetlands. Too little, too late. The big rains poured down, and the natural systems, which drained water from wetlands into Lake Victoria, collapsed. The rains fell in biblical proportions over many years, and, gradually, slowly but surely, Bwaise turned into a lake. People learned to live with it. Our house is built on the water, in the middle of a street with ten other houses. Bamboo frames, tethered to large rocks at the bottom, keep the houses firmly anchored in place, just as if it was land. When the wind is too strong, waves smash against our house and it sways, ever so gently. Yellow buoys float in front of the houses, to indicate to the boats where the ‘roads’ are, and a pavement, which is more of a dock, connects the houses such that you can walk from one end of the street to the other without getting wet. There is a special stop, like bus stops in the dry parts of the city, where we wait for boat taxis. This being a commercial street, the front of the houses have a room that is used as a shop. Ours is a synthetic timber workshop. 

Continue reading “First Day At Work”