When I left Small City, Apolika at eight years old, I left behind a small group of friends I did everything with. As kids, we would run around the village and hunt birds in the nearby bushes. That’s how we bonded. Now that we’re grown when I go back, we go to the beach. It’s how we pick up where we left off.
My friends have this one particular beach they like. It’s called Red Cardinal
Red Cardinal sits about 14 kilometers from Small Town. It is a perfect gate-away for young men who want to relax and unwind as they enjoy the cool rural breeze. The main activities here are swimming and sunbathing. But the young men my age prefer beach football, and an hour or two of aerobics in the only open-air gym in the area. The gym is a favorite of many of the folks here.
But then the last time we went, I discovered that for many of the folks here, all their abs and toned shapes had a much deeper purpose than looking good. The open-air gym, my friends told me, possesses a special luck for young men who want to move overseas
They believe that if you position yourself well here, and use the weights here to sculpt your body, by dressing well and making it beautiful enough, you will find a wife overseas, and that the gym has a track record to prove it.
Another member of the gym, this guy with perfectly sculpted arms called Derrick, jumped in to name their legends, the guys they’ve heard found wives overseas, success stories that get passed around at the gym.
There was a boda-boda rider who carried a woman around Small Town while she was visiting, always making sure to look presentable doing it. He made a good impression. They got married. And he just went to Germany a few months ago.
There was the handsome stylist who got a random phone call from a Ugandan living in Sydney. It was a wrong number but he charmed his way into a conversation, sent her some photos of his biceps, and they got married last year. He’s now living with her in Australia.
I respected the hustle. But their plans somehow didn’t sit right with me. The idea of guys I grew up with, men in my hometown using their bodies to get overseas, it made me uncomfortable. But then I sat down with a few of the guys and we started to talk. And I realized beneath the surface, beyond all the muscles, confidence, and bravado, all of these men were carrying around a broken heart, which brings me to the guy I wanted to talk to the most, my friend Hudson.
Hudson and I grew up in the same neighborhood. But we didn’t really get to know each other until we were grown. He’s a good-looking guy who’s easy to talk to. Not the greatest singer, but we were hanging out one day and he decided to sing me his favorite love song
Jason Mraz’s “I Won`t Give Up,” one of my favorite songs, is a song about not giving up on loving someone, loving oneself, and not giving up on one’s dreams. It’s basically Hudson’s story. It’s why he’s one of my friends who believes most blindly that finding love someplace else is the way to go. The girl he’s singing about is someone he studied with. Hudson says she was the smartest kid in their school. But she was always approachable. And he liked that. He liked that they could joke together.
After classes, he would walk to the bus stage and talk for hours in the process, getting to know each other. He says she was the first person who taught him how to love. This one day, he walked home from prayers and as soon as he opened the door, he saw her standing there with all his best friends from school, his family, and everyone, singing
She’d planned this elaborate surprise party for his 17th birthday, complete with all his favorite food- roasted duck and steamed cassava and all the people he loved. And on top of all that, she kissed him.
Neither of them came from money, far from it. But Hudson was growing up with a single parent. When his mother passed on, he went on to live with his grandparents.
But when they both died because of old age, Hudson became an orphan. His relationship with this woman was one of the few things in his life that felt stable. With her, he could dream. He could escape into one of their long talks about how sweet their lives would be in the future.
But when I reached out to her to get her side of the story, she didn’t want to be involved and she wouldn’t confirm anything Hudson said. At this point, I felt she had moved on miles away. The way Hudson tells it though, they had decided– she would work in the petroleum industry. He would become a doctor.
They wanted two to three kids and a house in Lira. Maybe they’d travel sometimes. I love the way he describes the love he had for her.
After they finished high school, she got a scholarship to attend university in Kampala, a city nearly 400 kilometers away. Hudson says she tried to put in a good word for him to get the same scholarship, but it didn’t work out. Still, he encouraged her to go. For three years, they continued their relationship via phone calls and SMS. She told him she was one of the top students in her class.
Back home, Hudson was struggling. He had no money, no parents, no connections in a country with no reliable jobs for young people. His dreams of becoming a doctor were fading. But word of his girlfriend’s success was starting to get passed around the community, like folklore. Potential suitors were reaching her on social media. And whenever that happened, she would tell Hudson and then block them immediately, until someone new approached her.
The guy was a South African-based lawyer. He had seen one picture of Hudson’s girlfriend and decided that she would be his wife. Hudson says she tried to ignore him, but the man contacted her family and formally asked for her hand. She told Hudson they were pressuring her to accept, telling her that a marriage with this man could not only change her future but her entire family’s too.
He watched as the eight years of their relationship unraveled over a short series of tearful WhatsApp calls. Nothing Hudson could say, nothing he could do, nothing he could offer her or her family was enough to convince them to choose him over a lawyer. A few months later, he says she received the ring via Posta Uganda and was married to this stranger.
The visionary feminist writer Bell Hooks says love is made up of seven parts. Wherever someone is practicing care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and open, honest communication, there is love, even in an economically poor environment like Small City. But talking to Hudson, I found myself thinking more about what love needs to survive, and what conditions can make the act of loving easier or more difficult to sustain. Hudson felt like he couldn’t compete because of money. And he was right. Not everyone has equal access to love.
In the years since I left Small City, I had fantasies about the lives of people back home. Our country had been ravaged by years of war led by rebel leader Joseph Konyi which left a lot of heartache, suffering, and poverty in its wake. But I believe that through all of that, people had each other, that they had this unbreakable bond that was vital to our survival. But Hudson was telling me that was wrong.
It wasn’t just Hudson. Almost every guy I talked to in Small Town told me the same thing. It felt like there was this lovelessness among the young men in Small City. Every time I raised a question– and I talked to around 18 or 19 people– they’d launch into their own stories of heartbreak. When I ask my friends in Kampala the same question about finding love without money, they say 60% to 80%.
If love was like everything else these guys couldn’t afford in Small City, if it really was a luxury, it made sense to me that they thought the best course of action was to look for it someplace else.
It was a way to solve two problems at once. They could move to a city where poverty was less rampant and true love was more accessible. But I wondered about it. Where would it lead them? For Hudson, it led him to the place most of us turn to for finding love these days, the internet.