Tombstones and Banana Trees by Medad Birungi

father’s other wives. The first item of bedding my mother was able to bring home was a sack, the sort used for shipping beans. It was cold up in the hills at night, and so it was a welcome addition to our home. But it was hardly comfortable. For that luxury we had to wait until my mother somehow got hold of some old surplus coats from the German army. These long winter coats lasted for years and years; they could be a bedsheet and blanket at the same time. When your floor is nothing but compressed mud, lying on one of these coats is enough to make you feel like a king.
    The goats’ urine put an end to those feelings. Somehow, no matter where we placed ourselves in the hut, their urine always trickled over to us while we slept. Eventually our mother made us a bed out of logs that raised us up off the floor, and the urine flowed freely underneath. Surprisingly, I do not remember the smell, so it was probably not too much of a problem.
    What clothes we had were basic. I wore a shirt. That was it. No pants, no trousers, no underwear, no shoes. I was eight years old when I got my first underwear and twenty-one when I got my first shoes. Whenever we did get new clothes they were secondhand ones that our mother would buy from the trading post. These days you see poor children all over Africa wearing T-shirts advertising the Western products and sports teams of yesterday, but when we were children we were not like these odd-looking billboards. However, we did have some strange clothes; once one of my uncles gave me an overall, an all-in-one red work suit with a hood attached. I felt like a man and wore it pretty much every day for four years, from the early days as a ten-year-old when it draped over my feet and hands right up to the point when it began to burst across my back and shoulders.
    Even though shoes were objects that had an almost mythical status, our feet were not always bare. The banana leaves made good sandals—good enough for a day, at least—and they prepared me for the time when, a few years before I married, I put on my first pair of real shoes that belonged to me. It was an odd moment, and I felt self-conscious as I flapped about. But I cannot deny that it felt good. Later I replaced these with a pair of rugabire —sandals made from car tires. They felt even better.
    I was thirteen years old when I started to work for money or food. I would carry things for people, help others brew their alcohol, or spend the whole day digging. I was good at trapping moles, using just a bit of rope, a couple of sticks, and a bit of luck. They were good to eat. Very delicious. And they made a change from our usual diet.
    My mother and sisters would work as well. They would dig or harvest for others, usually working from six in the morning to the same time at night, at the end of it receiving a bunch of matoke or whatever else they had been collecting during the day. If they worked every day for a month, apart from Sundays, and if we were not extravagant, we might be able to eat every day.
    Did we know life was hard? Before my father left, there were other families in the village that were poorer than we were—quite a few of them, in fact. But once he left we were even worse off than they were. Other families ate millet; we had maize. Some had cows; we had goats. Some started their fires with matches; we used sticks and grass. I do remember that there were some people who lived up in the hills, and even though they had animals, they felt that they were poor. If you were measuring poverty on how they looked, then they were poorer than us. But they had cows and we did not, so we were poorer. Yes, we knew life was harder than it might otherwise have been. But there was not the time to spend fretting over it; there was work to be done.
    It used to take us an hour to collect water. We would walk down the hill and poke the ground with our sticks until we freed the spring just below the muddy surface. When the water