The Decade and Detours of Authentic Rediscovery
How the two countries changed as I changed
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Such are the lessons of life, coded in nature and time, waiting to be decoded through a readiness to experience, unlearn, relearn, and rediscover.
The rules of scoring goals in life can vary from simple counts, quality, and on to the grace of style, further graduated along personalised timescales.
Shaka Ssali, the pioneer host of the VOA’s Straight Talk Africa, put it rightly: the shortest distance between two points in life is not a straight line, but a detour. Fact. The rules of scoring goals in life can vary from simple counts, quality, an on to the grace of style, further graduated along personalised timescales. For example, though a goal in football simply counts irrespective of the style of the player, style does matter when scoring in other spheres, such as essay competitions.
It was the year 2004. The exact date? August the fourth. I was flying out of my homeland on a scholarship mission to the so-called land of ideas. Barely two years earlier, my motherland had grabbed the global headlines for a revolutionary general election that ushered in a new president with fresh ideas for socioeconomic transformation, but not before 24 long years under the reign of an invincible leader and self-proclaimed political “giraffe”. The metaphor was not misplaced, after all. He was towering, literally and figuratively, above his competitors. He easily outwitted and outmanoeuvred the opposition, only bowing out after the end of the ten-year term limit imposed by a hard-won change of the constitution.
With the new president, a breeze of freshness blew across the land and hope was visible on the horizon. The citizens later got christened the most optimistic people on earth. Again, this was not misplaced; it was not a misnomer. Their countenance told it all as major infrastructure developments began steadily transforming the face of the nation. Where potholes were the norm, clean tarmac roads took over, almost effortlessly. Economic growth picked up. The tourism sector grew vibrant, booming like the verdure that eventually crowns a field recovering from a conflagration when watered…
