When I was young, my parents struggled to ensure I survived. I was  a very sickly child. In fact many people in my village, Nawaka, never thought I would survive the many sicknesses that inflicted on me.

I would  hear some say: “Why did God create this one?” But God to whom all time belongs just ignored them. For most of them God knew they would not be there when I celebrate my 75^th birthday on July 27, 2024.

Hope of me surviving the early childhood health setbacks were forever sky-high in my parent. They parents did not lose heart. Hope was their other name and it was not coincidental. Reason is, my father, Charles Afunaduula Ovuma, had been a medical assistant with the Kenya African Rifles in Nairobi, Namungalwe, Namusagali and Jinja (in present day Gaddafi Barracks and Jinja Referral Hospital). Mother, Stephanie Kyabwe Wabiseatyo, was a nurse trainee at Mulago Hospital when father got interested in her in early 1949. Father was an Anglican protestant. Mother was a Catholic.

The two parents set aside their faith differences and pooled their health skills together to ensure that I survived.  So when my father breathed his last on  December 25, 2007 and my mother on February 7, 2016, they left me breathing on. I am now the oldest man in Bulawa, Nawaka Village, Ikumbya Subcounty, Luuka County, Busoga. The explanation is God.

When both my parents were alive and living together, it was in a polygamous family, in which my mother was the eldest of the mothers that my father had assembled. At one time there were eight mothers under one roof of a house with 12 rooms.  The house still stands on the biocultural landscape of Bulawa, Nawaka, but it has been greatly improved by  Charles Afunaduula Ovuma’s children.

As I write the children are working on installing solar electricity in it and planning to supply piped water to it. They have waited for the government to do these two essential acts to no avail.

All the parents in Charles Afunaduula Ovuma’s house wanted their children to build their houses in Bulawa or Bugonza before they returned to the pavilion to be with their Maker in the hereinafter. Some children took heed, listened and started to transform their village with their small modern houses. I was one of those that listened. And I saw the wisdom of building a house in my village when I retired from public service. I had grown up hating urban life. Even when I lived in Tanzania and Kenya I would prefer rural life. It seems I was pre-adapting to retirement life in my rural setting.

I have been telling my children and brothers that they belong more to their village than Kampala, Iganga, Luwero, Kamuli, Jinja, Kampala, Mbarara or Gulu, where some have decided to build. I remind them of the old adage: “East or west home is best.” The cradle.

When calamity strikes we all end up in the village. Our friends and others converge in the village to console with us. Let us transform our village by totting it with our modern houses”.

I tell them this despite the fact that my first house, which I built in the early 1980s was a thatched house. I can’t tell them to replicate my story because the spear grass (olubembe) and reeds, which I used as construction materials have virtually disappeared from Nawaka village.

• A Tell report / By Prof Oweyegha-Afunaduula, a former professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences of the Makerere University, Uganda