Someone came to visit today. A dry matter-of-fact visit to regularise one or the other family Covid-19 Certificates issued by the Ministry of Health. An offer and acceptance of a Sprite to wash the dust down turned our chat from the usual talk. I asked him what he would do for work when the pandemic ended. In his upcountry accent, all teeth, nasal vowels and hard consonants, interspersed with the odd burp from the soda, he said that he’d be just fine in his position as Head of Lab for a major testing laboratory. I goggled, thinking us fortunate to have such easy access to this man of unexpected standing. He’s been doing our covid testing for some time now, coming to wherever we are, at our convenience.

Sprite loosens the tongue, and with his frank, unaffected gaze he told me that he was about to begin a six-year course as a surgeon. He would have started earlier, he said, just after his A-Levels, but his parents were too poor to afford the university fees. Being from the village has its disadvantages in the big city, and he was passed over for university admittance in favour of more well-connected candidates. In response, he gained a bursary and spent three years learning how to be a lab technician in a local hospital, which led to his present job.

He told me that he graduated from primary school in a small village in Eastern Uganda in 2006, and as he was bright, he scored a first division result. He was the first student in the history of that school to do so. And the last. In the intervening fifteen years, not one other student has repeated this feat. Poor facilities, poor teaching, and lack of exposure mean learning in the village is, for nearly everyone, unlikely to be a route out of there. Kampala children have the added advantage of being able to pay to have first sight of the national examination papers, guaranteeing a pass, graduation, and a well-paying job. He said that his early history studies taught him that this is known as a “bourgeois democracy”. I asked him if he knew what happened to the bourgeoisie at other times and, with a wide smile, he said he did.

His three years in the hospital lab and current standing have made it difficult for the university to ignore him any longer, and they admitted him into the surgeons’ course a few weeks ago. When he graduates as a surgeon, he plans to do a master’s degree as a neurosurgeon outside Uganda. A young father of one, he will need to juggle the demands of a full-time course, raising a family, and a full-time job.

There are so many like him who have the deck stacked against them. So much talent squandered. His fragile journey has many years and many pitfalls ahead of it, but his quiet determination gives me hope. His hard-earned village knowledge is the real thing, and he now has the street smarts he needs to get ahead in the big city. We’ll be watching you…best of luck.