I am younger, I am at church and I see children that are blind. I have never seen blind children so I take interest and ask the lady why these children don’t see, why they are in a line, why they are following each other and what I can do to help them? She looks at me and asks me to give them merely sweets. I request for her address; she gives me directions but of course she doesn’t expect me to go. It is around the period of elections, country wide elections. In my home, during this period my parents have begun stocking things such as maize, beans and peas because of inflation. I tell myself I am going to steal from those and take to the children.

The next day, while my parents are at work, I get a polythene bag packed with peas, rice and sugar and plan to set off the day thereafter. It is still morning by the time I reach and she is extremely happy. As excited as sunrise, she has found out that someone is there for these children as she says, “As a child, I expected you to show up with only sweets! But we need foodstuffs too!”I steal from the sacks every day to take the blind children food. Sometimes being disabled comes with other challenges such as poverty. I remember one day my mother asks what is happening to the sacks of foodstuffs. Because I am the first suspect, she asks me, “Anha! Specy what is happening to the food?” I smiled and brushed it off and before I could even shift my attention she says, “Specy your brothers have been saying that you’re always talking about Bill Gates and how he sold off his mother’s furniture. You know you can sell the peas, sugar and rice as long as you don’t sell off my cutlery and furniture.”I smile and say, “Okay Mummy.”

The sugar, peas and beans heist keep going until one day, while at church and standing next to my mother, I see the lady coming towards us. She hugs my mother saying, “thank you!” At this point my mother is looking at me a back, a folding her hands and spreading her fingers outward. She says, “Well… um, if she’s helping then that is great!” She is proud of me, I can tell.

It pains like a scold when you find out that there are cold hearted parents that mistreat these children. While we are in the bus at Entebbe Airport, one of children asks whether it is a bus or a plane. We are confused as to whether we should tell them the truth or tell them it is a plane. In the end I had to tell them, “we are in a bus but maybe if you stay in school and work hard you will get to be in a plane.” It is things such as these that have made me come up with a campaign for inclusive education for children with disabilities. If at the end of the day these children will be examined using the same parameters like their able-bodied counterparts, why aren’t they being exposed to the same things. It has been two years since I started working with her and we are just getting started.