My 2025.

PREAMBLE

If I am to count some of the hard and yet most important years in my life, 2025 cant really miss. In fact it competes for the first position along with other years, except that others were filled with mostly pain but this, lessons mostly. I think maybe because it was my silver jubilee (uncelebrated) but whatever the case, I learned my lesson. Let us dive deep into the iconic year.

AFTER SCHOOL

After having finished school in december of 2024, I was glad because I was done with the nagging school routine, but most importantly I was going to be working and having my own money. My friends and I left with hopes high; whereas some already had jobs secured for them, some of us first went home and settled. For my case, I became a farmer and was helping on the harvesting of millet and other farm activities. Of course you know that in western uganda the seaseion for harvesting millet is late December and early January. Life at home was very fine, I was free, especially free from books and the nagging school routine plus speaking English all day, only that i was too broke to enjoy life there. That is what always disturbed me. I was at zero to the extent that I could not afford data for 2000 ugx. I remember of an incident when my hair was too shabby and overgrown to the extent that my mum volunteered to give me 2000 ugx to go to a saloon and chop the hair fot that I could at least look like a normal person. on my way to the saloon, I remembered that I had spent a week without going online. That is when a thought flashed my mind and instead of going for a  haircut, I branched and bought airtime and bought data 1GB by then for my internet. on reaching home, I was questioned and that's when I surrendered my hair to be trimmed with a pair of scissors by my own mum. Lluckily she is a talented barber, she has been chopping hair for her fellow women in the village and at least she did her best though she made my head to look like a woman's. Those are the hardships I had started to go through. On another instance, in our neighbourhood there is a local entrepreneur who had started there a small clinic and he was employing a nurse to do the work for her; and because of village conditions, the latter decided to quit. Someone gave in my name to be a replacement to her but when we talked and exchanged numbers, he never called me again. the temporary comfort I had gotten had started to turn otherwise. Days started to last for 30 hours, I started to rub shoulders with family members. That was in January of this very year (2025). So on one day, a friend of mine, a midwife whom we had practised together at some health centre  IV in Rukungiri district; Buhunga Health Centre IV called Ankunda Racheal sent me a screenshot of an advert of a company that was looking for workers especially health workers that did not need a transcript. All they needed was a testimonial; a recommendation letter from the former school. i tried applying by email but it could not go till the rece3ipient sent me his whatsapp number and I sent my application letter and CV which I had prepared earlier. One day, I was on a burial as we had lost a relative in some kind of distant neighbourhood, I received a Whatsapp message calling me to Mbarara for interviews. My first ever interviews for my profession. But unfortunately I had never spent a good time in Mbarara so I did not know where to go and how tov do it. Of course we are the gen z, the technological generation, so i contacted chatgpt and made enouigh research. my dad gave me a 50,000 note and I travelled to mbarara for the grand interview.

MY FIRST INTERVIEW

The interview was not as hard as i had feared it to be, it was in two parts; the written and the oral. on reaching there, fear engulfed me like fire on a dry piece of yarn and i got scared. we were six people and they wanted one person so in my mind i was lie i could not get that kind of job. remember i had not received my last semester results and the testimonial i had was even fake though they could not detect it. i would say the written interview was simople because it was the surface of the basic infirmation i had gotten from college. ooh i forgot to say that the company was dealing in herbal medicine and food supplements. So having been a pharmacy student, i held an upper hand in the interview because i was employing most of my pharmacognosy. Time for the oral interview came and i think i was the third person to be interviewed. i needed the job so much to the extent that i gave it all my best. that was early february. After the interview i connected with one of my long time friends who had just gotten a job there too. That evening i went home and patiently or impatiently waited for a call to tell me the results of the interview. 

On another normal morning, i woke up as usual because all mornings had been like that with the same nagging routine, i woke up and was doing my daily activities as always including a compulsory afternoon nap. Why? Because i did not have what to do. I received a whatsapp message informing me that i had passed the interview and that i should cinsent whether i was satisfied with the terms and conditions, salary, nature of the job amd the rest. opf course i could not wait. i quickly said yes and thats how i got my first ever job. a friend of my parents connects me to some group of young men where i could be getting accomodation.i set off to mbarara for work. 

MY FIRST JOB

Work was good because at least i got a chance to tour places. on my second day i went to Ntungamo, then coming days to Bwizibwera, Ibanda, Kazo, Isingiro, Rwampara, Buhweju, Lytantonde, Ssembabule; generally besides work there was enjoyment. I remember we could enjoy to the fullest during those outreaches. our boss even booked for us a table at a show in Ishaka that featured Eddy Kenzo. I felt I was living my dream life. Me the village boy had finally gotten out of the cage. I remember after the ishaka show we went to World Vision bar in Kizinda and i got the best vibe i have never gotten that day. Sop we kept ha ving outreaches around and outside mbarara and life nenerally got along better. Two weeks later, i lost my uncle and our neighbour and i had tontravel to the village for the burial. After the burial i went back and work kept going on very well.

During that same time period, something disheartening happened. That day i had woken up at 5 am set to go to Marinde, a small trading centre deep in the mountains of Buhweju District. on our way, one of the boys i slept with in the room asking me if i had seen what had happened to our third roommate. of course i did not know because i had left them asleem and i did not want to disturb their sleep, so i would wake up and prepare myself as quetly as possible and left them sleeping. He later revealed to me that our roommate had passed on in his sleep. Of course i got shocked, people started calling me to ask me whether i had seen anything on him and trust me i had not seen anything styrange that night. i waited for evening to go back to Mbarara and found that the dead body had been taken to the village for burial. i had to ask for permission to go home and bury my friend and it was granted. it was a tense and emotional moment but as the bible says, He is the one who gives and takes. Life continues. went back to Mbarara to work. it was in that period that our examining body decided to release our end of semeter examinations and guess what! i had passed. in fact excelled. Part of the causes of my worries ended.  A few days from then, my former company decided to open a full time branch in Ishaka where it had to have permanent staff living around, but the weekend before the opening there was a big seminar organized at one of the big hotels in Ishaka and we attended. From there they announced that i was going to be part of the full time staff that was going to be staying imn Ishaka. I was happy because with time, i came to hate the idea of moving around everyday because it would make me tired.  The charm was there in the beginning and later, it started bein boring and hectic. I literally had one day to pack all that belonged to me and shift from mbarara to ishata at my new workplace along with my another co worker. They had to rent a room for me which i got after two days, and pay me part of my salary as advance that i used to buy some house property. I had a mattress, a pair of bedsheets, a basin, bucket, percolator, my few clothes and my flat iron. Thats when I started independent life of living alone. I was to work as the main medic at the facility which i did, and within the first two months we were one of the best performing branches.

LIFE IN ISHAKA

However much we were working hard, my attitude towards the job kept changing. Gradually i realized i needed better. Ranging from ther nature of the work to the pay, my mind came to a temporary decision that i did not belong there. it did not sit well with me and the more i thought about it, the more it hit me. I started getting adverts and applying. Due to my basic computer skills, I had kind of forged a fake testimonial and i was using that on my CV. I was applying on email using the company computer and wifi and most companies i applied to could not even sent me feedback even if it was a reject email. its only a handful of companies that did. 

MY SECOND INTERVIEW

Somewhere around that time I was called for an interview for being a medical representative for a certain company around Mbarara and  the whole of western uganda at large. i was informed at 10 a.m and i was supposed to be available at the place at 5:00 p.m in the evening. i tried as much as possible to make it on time but i was late. due to the pressure of bein late, i got comfused and i answered the interview as a primary school child. i remember there is a situation that they asked me and i could nort get an answer. The question was asking what i could do in case a doctor refused to allow me talk to him. I thing the interviewer assessed and saw that i was not fit for the role. i did not receive any call from then and that is when i knew that i had missed the job. The element of thinking that i did not belong there kept building in me and ut went to the peak when our boss cut almost 21% of my small monthly salary because of a shortage in funds that i knew nothing about. So one day towards the end of the month of May, an old friend of mine brings a deal on table. She connects me to a big hospital in kampala where i am to be working as i explore on other opportunities. I see it as a chance of revenge for having chopped my money. 

THE RUNAWAY EMPLOYEE

Over the weekend I planned on my escape without informing anyone. I secretly transported my property back home and remained with a handful of luggage which I moved along with to Kampala. I was given interviews which I passed and the remaining step was onboarding and adding me to the staff which is the point that I failed from. I was informed that the hospital director was in South Africa and I was told to volunteer for two months; which i declined. I travelled back to Mbarara hoping to get my salary for the previous mointh and go back home. Luckily i was given a seconsd chance and allowed back in the company. Even my salary was to be raised if i could hit a certain monthly target; which i did in only 3 weeks. I was really grateful for having gotten my job back, but the other psychological bias remained. I worked for the month of June but kept applying at many adverts, till this one company in Mbarara advertised. The friend of mine i had hinted on in the beginning who was already settled in Mbarara was already working for that company so I had an upper hand in getting the job.

MY THIRD INTERVIEWS

I was called for interviews, which i travelled in mbarara and did them. I was told I was to wait for the feeedback. Now during that time on that saturday after the interview, i met my workmate by then and it was a  trade fair at Kakyeka stadium and we went for the same. We had fun and came back home to sleep deep in the night. It was a company meeting the following day which we held successfully and were paid our salaries in full. It was also a preparation meeting for one of our workmate's party and there was alot of alcohol and most of us left while drunk. After the meeting, we did the same the following day; going to Kakyeka stadium for fun, but unfortunately we came back home while drunk and a thief in the neighbourhood made an operation and stole all  the phones in the homestead including my 2 phones; a smart one and a button phone. Remember my salary had been deposited on my MTN number and all i had in my pockets was a 5000 note; remember i had to go to Ishaka for work. Another wirkmate of mone decided to lend me some money which i paid when i had reached and received my daily allowance. During that time i was expecting a call from the company where i had done my interview, but my phones were all off. I called my mum from the village to finf me in ishaka and we replaced one of the sim cards whereas the one of MTN was replaced by my dad. Later, i received a call that i had passed the interviews and i was told to go to Mbarara for the briefing. Now where i was working, i was using a laptop computer with an internet connection. I had logged my whatsapp in the company computer and i continued using it in the absence of my phone. Finally it was time to resign, i sent my former boss a message via whatsapp and that evening i left the company in peace. I went home for some time then ion a saturday i retiurned to Ishaka with my dad to reactivate my MTN mobile money and recover my money which i used to buy the phone i am carrying right now.  I went to mbarara and i was briefed; I was to work as a medical representative for a Pakistani company called ATCO laboratories that mainly majored in manufacture odf dermatological products.

MY NEW JOB THEN

ATCO laboratories had a range of 15 products but most of them were dermatological; and its only Mbarara University of Science and Technology that has a dermatological department so i was told i had an upper hand in marketing my products at MUST, hence the exploration of market in mbarara with myself as the agent there. I was connected with the country manager of ATCO and briefed me on the requirements. I had to open a bank account, which i had never opened since the aquisition of my national ID in 2024, a letter from chairman LC1, parents details, certificate of good conduct from ISO, recent pay slips, TIN, NSSF number, where i had most of them and i travelled home to find the rest. Anyways i had to go to Kampala for a one week training at the head offices along Bombo road. So every morning i would commute on foot from my aunty's place in Katwe to go to Bombo road for training. I was given product knowledge, marketing skills and got a chance to meet some of the top people of the company from pakistan including one big doctor there who had come to train us. I would say it was a good time but by then i was facing financial difficulties. At the end of training, we werer driven to a fancy hotel in Bukoto where we has dinner as a company as we bid farewell to our Pakistani bosses, but on coming back, i had to call my mum to send me some money for transport. It was a hard journey but at least i tried my best. Anyways over the weekend i gtravwlled back to Mbarara to begin on my job. Before i had gone to Kampala i had done a market survey so i was to start by lknowing my competitors in the market. The funny thing i remember is that it was company opolicy toi share live location on whatsapp in the company whatsapp group every hour, which i easily outsmaarted in the story that i am going to tell later. In the forst week, i never had neither promotional material nor stock; so it was going to be hard for me to do the promotion. i even had less knowledge on the products i was going to be marketting. So i was instructed to always stay at the distributors office till the samples and promotional material arrive. The promotional material arrived later and i had to start the marketing. 

Reporting was to be done to both parties; the distributor and the company. I tried as much as possible to make sure that my products got market, but i think they were unmarketable. Remember i was new and i was always moving alone. It became hard; the rejections and disappointyments were alot. There was also a policy at Mbarara regional referral hospital whereby they used to arrest all the meducal representatives they could suspect being inside the facility.Now about outsmarting their process, on my second day, they wanted me to go to town and meet doctors when i did not have promotional material. i was forced into the habit of using fake GPS. This is an application that sends mock locations to ythe preference of the owner of the gadget. It is difficult to detect since it also entyers deep into tyhe developer options. So i would search for a place, place there my fake GPS pin and send a live location showing the area where i have dropped the pin when iactually i could be in another place.

I tried hard to market the products. I befriended many doctors, dispensers, hospital staff as well as my fellow drug representatives. At the beginner level as i was, I did all it took to make sure that in push the products but things refused. One day we organised a CME at university eye center and we ended up getting a sale of aroind 1.5 million. All in all despite the effort business was not moving. I hustled with business for two and a half months and i did what it took to make the business booming but i wwas nou getting support from the proprietors of the business. I tried hinting to them but its like they were doing a market survey, an experiment and unfortunately i was to be part of it. I remember when i was being recruitted i was told that they needed someone without experience; and that was me. In the month of September, a friend of mine, an old boy from college had gotten a job in mbarara, remember he was not from there. Actually he had never gone to Mbarara. So he gave me a call and i welcomed him to my place. We lived together for a monthg as we were trying to figure out life. 

BACK TO UNEMPLOYMENT

At the end of September, i received a phone call  from my supervisor to report to Kampala the following day, at the main office. it was sudden and i did not know what they wanted to do with me, i thought it was a meeting that needed me physically. He even told me to first fetch some orders from Gittoes Pharmacy Mbarara, so that made me think that things were okay. On reaching Kampala, I looked for the man who had called me. He sat me on a table and sat the opposite side, and broke the bad nerws to me. Unapologetically, unresmorsefully tells me the company has decided to continue without me and they did not want to fire me, so he told me to resign voluntarily. He also addedsome stuff that he was sorry, he had kids to pay school fees for and it was hard for him to make such a decision. it really hit me hard that i told him i needed to first talk to my supervisor in Mbarara,  the owner of the distribution company because he is the one that had recruitted me for the job. On talking to him for like ten minutes, he told me that they had already talked about it and had reached that as a final decision. I could notb believe in my eyes what was happening to me. It was the first time ever in the year that i shed tears. I thought iu had been strong for the year but that mioment hit me really hard. I asked for a paper and resigned voluntarily and left their office and went back to my auntys place. I tried hard to smile, it was too difficult to break the news especially to my parents. The following day i went to go back to Mbarara and the first thing that was in my mind was to burn everything that belonged to my former company. I gathered everything incliding promotional material, samples and my identifications including business cards and took them at once and burned them. I think its from then that i felt a bit relieved. In the evening another kind of what i called bad news came; my friend whom i had lived wiuth for a month was transferred to Kampala work station and given one day to do it. At that miment everything on my side had started to break down and i had nothing to do except to accept. that evening I bid farewell to my friend and started living alone on minimal savings.  My plan was to get a job because what was always on my mind was graduation that was always awaiting me in December of this same year. I could hide in my room playing music all day.Time reached and i could not enjoy music anymore. I started eating one meal a day trying to save money for another day. I started applying to Health Training Institutions in order to be a tutor and some school called me. I went and passed the first test and i was allowed in school. it was  during time for School Based Assessment butr i was told to be around. The goal was to volunteer for a few months then i get recruitted. I was even given accomodation but it took me long to accept it. I had already given in, but the graduation thing always disturbed my mind. So what I loved about that place is that lunch was always assured. 

After two weeks, I lost interest because i saw i had nothing to do there. One friday i refused to go and stayed at home despite the act that i had showered and ready to go. I went back to my bed. Now, my friend who had been gtransferred to kampala later sent me an advert of a hospital that was near his workplace, but of course i knew i could not get becaise i never had experience and neither did i have a licence. I had already picked my transcript from college; the story of the transcript went like this. In september, we received a notification that our transcripts were out. I called my supervisor and told him i wanted permission to travel to Gulu and pick it. He instead told me that I needed to do that in October, and i also accepted. I don't know what happened later but i changed my mind and decided to escape one weekend and go. I travelled Saturday to kampala, then Sunday to Gulu and was meant to pick it on Monday then travel back on Tuesday.  I did so only that i could not finish the process on monday. It got done on Tuesday, and by Wednesday i was in Mbarara. All  those weekdays i was reporting via fake GPS. So the transcript was already available and i sent my friend my CV, aand cover letter, just for the sake. Meanwhile there is a pharmacy that i contacted but they told me the opening would be there in November snd i was supposed to volunteer for the whole month of october, which i quickly turned down.

BACK TO KAMPALA

There is also another pharmaceutical company based in Kampala that needed a medical representative in Kampala and I had submitted my CV and application letter too. I was in Mbarara locked in my room waiting for an opportunity to come and wanted to go back home once the month ended without getting one. So ione evening, i get a call from this big hiospital in Kampala inviting me for interviews on a Tuesday. In October. I was not ready to go because i knew i could not qualify or pass the interview. I called him and told him in was not going which pissed him off.  He called all our mutual friends to tell me and convince me to go to the interview. I did not want to waste my transport. What made me accept to go is that the pharmaceutical company that i had appliued to called me on a Monday when the other hospital had called me on a Tuesday. I travelled to Kampala over the weekend to prerpare myself for the interviews.  That monday i went to the company's offices and did the interviews, submitted my documents and i was told i would be on boarded oince the HR ciomes back to the country. I started preparing myself for the intervierw of the following day. I travelled to my friend's place that monday evening. The following day i was ready for the interviewes. I arrived at 8:30 and we werer already nine in the queue waiting to be interviewed. I gave up froim there and then. Minuted later more people kept coming and i knew that was the end of it all. They arranged us, put us into an elevator and went to the interview room. I made sure i do my best, spoke the truth and waited for the results.  They promisded to give me a follow up call the followong day which prompted me to stay for another day. Anyways two days later, i received a call congratulating me upon being successful from the interview. I managed to stay around because the following monday i was supposed to report on Monday for induction, which i did and the rest was history. The following weekend was to be 1st of November and i was to go to Mbarara to bring my property back to Kampala and stay there permanently, but also what was taking me to Mbarara that weekend was Ray G's show that was supposed to be at Kakyeeka stadium. I travelled over the night and reached Mbarara the following morning. later during the day i connected  with my friend and we went together to enjoy the party. The miracle that happened is that we had used MoMo Pay at 10k and we were given VIP tickets. That was the first time i became happy in over a month. The show ended in the  morning and i had to travel to Kampala.

CONCLUSION

Meanwhile I reported to my new work place, and have been working there since then. Life became really hard getting used to the situation around town. In the middle of December, I successfuly went back to Gulu College of Health Sciences with my parents for my graduation. it has really been a tough year but i thank God that it is about to end. Suffering was there but i still have good life,and healthy. Hoping for a good 2026.