Meet My Father!

Meet my father.
To make sure that my place of birth would bare a hospital name, my father rode a bicycle while my expectant (pregnant) mother carried a lamp on her laps so my father could see the small path amidst the darkness of the jungle they crossed deep in the night, to make it to Pallisa hospital, Eastern Uganda. It didn’t make it any easier that there was a Lion that lived in that jungle but am glad the three of us made it to hospital so I could live to tell the story!
When my paternal Auntie delivered the ‘bad news’ to the village that my mother had delivered a girl child, my father teamed up with my mother to ignore the ridicule that many women who bore girl children in my village experience. They helped me live through the discrimination and name calling (including prostitute) growing up from men and boys alike.
My father despite his modest income and the challenges of displacement due to armed conflict that we suffered as a family, made a decision to take his girls to school-6 of us, making sure we all made it to University. Onetime he made a trip to my sister’s high school which had refused her to study mathematics claiming only boys who were capable of passing the subject should study mathematics. His protests paid off. My sister went on to study and pass mathematics and specialized in Accounting at University!
When his girls grew up, my father refused to take bride price for any of his daughters who got married. Where the in laws insisted, he advised them to give the groom (their son) the cows who needed them the most to support his new family.
Now that we are grown up (some married with families of their own), he has given us land in which to build a house, (in our village home of origin) amidst a patriarchal society where land is owned by men. Today with his support, we are building, one brick at a time and one of my brothers in law is the site Engineer! The first man in the village to give customary land to his daughters, the whole village is in shock but my father has set a precedence for generations to come.
Join me in celebrating the men in our lives who have supported us through the years!