Item 6: A Good Job With an Office

6. Get a good job with a office and a desk and my name on the door. Work hard and they will promote you. (Gorvernment or a NGO. Not a shop.)

This is the third item in the plan numbered six. I have counted several times, hoping one of them would turn into a seven, and none has. Somewhere around the middle of the exercise book my twelve-year-old self lost the thread of her own numbering and kept going with total confidence. She would not have noticed. She was too busy furnishing the office.

Look at what she asked for. A desk, which is reasonable. An office, which is ambitious. A name on the door, which tells you she had been to exactly one office in her life, probably a headmaster's, and had decided that the brass plate was the point. Then there is the promise in the middle, written as a law of physics: work hard and they will promote you. Note who "they" are. She had no idea, but she trusted them completely. Last comes the parenthesis, where she rules out the shop with the snobbery only a child who has never paid rent can afford.

I have that page open beside me as I write. Next to it I have drawn the four columns in pen, and under Planned I have copied her words exactly, spelling of "Gorvernment" included, because she earned the right to be quoted accurately even when she was wrong about everything else.

Under Happened, I have been sitting for twenty minutes.

The month after graduation, I bought a flash disk. That was my first act as a professional. It was a red one from a shop on Kampala Road, four gigabytes, sold to me by a young man who assured me it was original in the tone people use when it is not. On it I saved my CV, my academic transcripts scanned at a bureau in Wandegeya, a cover letter with the company name left as XXXX so I could swap it out, and a passport photo in which I was trying to look employable and had mostly achieved looking arrested.

I had a system. Of course I had a system. I had got into Makerere with a system, I had survived Makerere with a system, and I had walked across that stage in my gown with good grades and a smile you have already seen, because the system had held when nothing else did. So I made a table. Organisation, position, date applied, method (email, hand delivery, "through someone"), follow-up date, outcome. I printed it and stuck it on the wall above my bed in the room at Mama's house, where I had moved back "just for a few months."

Some of you have a table like that. Some of you have it in a spreadsheet with conditional formatting, so a row turns red when a deadline passes. I respect you. I also want you to know where this is going.

Every Monday and Thursday I bought the New Vision for the job pages, and I read them the way my grandmother read Scripture, hunting for the verse addressed to me personally. In between, I refreshed BrighterMonday on my phone until the battery begged for mercy. The adverts had a language of their own, and I became fluent in it the way a prisoner learns the guards' shift patterns.

Entry-level position. Minimum five years' experience.

Must be aged 23 to 26 with a Master's degree and proven track record in project management.

Attractive package. (The package was never described. It was attractive the way a sealed envelope is attractive.)

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted. (Everyone else could assume they had died.)

Applicants should be dynamic, self-motivated, result-oriented team players with excellent communication skills, computer literacy, and the ability to work under minimal supervision and with no transport refund.

I am only slightly exaggerating the last one.

In the first two months I applied for forty-three positions. I know because the table told me. Thirty-eight of those rows were never filled in under Outcome. The remaining five held, in order: a regret email that addressed me as "Dear Applicant," a regret email that addressed me by someone else's name, an interview, an interview, and a phone call from a number I did not recognise. A woman asked if I was still interested in the position. Which position, I asked. She said she would call me back. Reader, she is still preparing to call me back.

I was not discouraged yet. I want to be fair to her, that girl with the red flash disk. She thought she was in the waiting room. Waiting rooms she understood. She had waited for the Makerere admission list, refreshed it until her phone died, and it had come. In her experience, the waiting room was the price of the office.

The first interview was for a "Programme Assistant" position at an NGO in Ntinda whose name had three abbreviations and the word "Empowerment" in it. I wore the black suit Mama had bought for my graduation week, which was slightly too warm for any temperature above sixteen degrees. I arrived forty minutes early. The security guard looked at my envelope of documents and at my shoes and said, "Interview?" in a voice that had seen a hundred of me that week.

There were nine of us in the waiting area. We were all wearing the same suit in slightly different fits. Two of the girls had been in my hall at Makerere. We greeted each other with the specific warmth of people who are about to compete for one salary.

The panel was three people and a jug of water nobody offered me. A man in a checked shirt asked me where I saw myself in five years. I had prepared for this. I said something about growth and contributing to the organisation's mission. What I did not say, because I had not yet admitted it to myself, was that I saw myself in the office of item six with my name on the door, Mama photographing the door.

Then the woman in the middle, who had been scrolling on her phone, looked up and asked, "Who referred you?"

I said nobody had referred me. I had seen the advert.

She nodded slowly, as if I had said I had walked from Gulu, and went back to her phone.

I did not get the job. I later learned, through the efficient intelligence network that is any group of Makerere alumnae on WhatsApp, that the position had gone to the niece of a board member. She had a diploma and a car. I want to say clearly that I do not blame her. If my auntie had been on a board, I would have accepted the job with gratitude and a cake.

That was my introduction to what people in Kampala call technical know-who. You have heard of it, or you have lived inside it. A degree gets you into the waiting room. A name gets you through the door. Everybody knows this, and nobody puts it in the advert, the way nobody puts "the pastor's son will be leading worship regardless" in the church bulletin.

So I adapted. I called people.

You need to understand what calling people costs a girl who wrote, at twelve, Never give any one a reason to talk. Asking for a connection is asking to be talked about. It means saying aloud, to an uncle at a funeral or a family friend in the car park after church, I do not have a job. It means being looked at with a particular expression that I came to recognise the way you recognise a song from its first note. It is two parts sympathy, one part relief that it is not their child.

I asked anyway. I asked a cousin of Mama's who worked at a ministry. I asked a man from our church who was "high up" at a bank. Nobody could tell me how high. I asked a former lecturer who had once written "Excellent, very promising" in the margin of my coursework, and who replied to my email with "Let me see what I can do," which in Ugandan English is a complete sentence and also a door closing very slowly.

The ministry cousin invited me to come and see him. I took two taxis and a boda to an office block with a broken lift, climbed to the fourth floor, and sat in a reception with a secretary who was eating groundnuts out of a paper cone. There was also a calendar from 2014 and a poster about integrity. I waited three hours and forty minutes. I know because I had nothing else to do but watch the clock, and by the second hour I had started counting the groundnuts.

When he finally called me in, he was kind. He was genuinely kind, and that made it worse. He told me how proud the family was of my degree. He told me things were tough, very tough, the economy, these young people, eh. He took my CV, folded it in half, and put it in his breast pocket. Then he asked me whether I had considered teaching, because teachers are always needed. Before I left, he gave me ten thousand shillings for transport. I did not want to take it, and I took it.

On the boda home I held the money so tightly it was damp when I got off. I had spent eight thousand to get there.

He was still around then. My Makerere person, the one whose name I am still not ready to put on a page. In those months after graduation we were still together in the way that two people stay together when neither has said otherwise.

There was no fight. I keep wanting to give you a fight, because a fight would make a better scene and would give me somewhere to put the anger. There was no fight. He had gone home to his people upcountry after exams, with a promise to come back when he found something. I stayed in Kampala with my red flash disk and my table. We called every evening at first, then most evenings, then when one of us remembered. He sent the cheap night bundles. I sent voice notes describing the interviews in detail, doing the voices of the panel, and he would reply with one line, Ha, these people, or You will get it.

He was never a talker. His love had always lived in his hands. At university he was the one who fixed the hinge on my wardrobe door with a nail and the heel of a shoe. He was the one who opened up my dead phone and pressed something inside it and handed it back alive. On the phone there was nothing for his hands to fix. There was only my voice, getting thinner, and his, getting shorter.

One evening in the fourth month I told him about the ministry office and the groundnuts. I did the secretary's voice. I did the cousin folding my CV. I waited for him to laugh.

He said, "Mmm."

There was a long silence with the hiss of the network in it. I could hear a radio somewhere behind him, a football match, a crowd rising.

"Are you there?" I asked.

"I'm here," he said. "It's just. You know." The crowd behind him roared.

I said I knew. I did not know. We said goodnight, and I lay with the phone on my chest until the screen went dark by itself.

After that the calls came further apart, the way the sound of a taxi does when it has passed you and turned a corner. You keep thinking you can still hear it.

This is where the phone becomes its own chapter. It does not get one, because I refuse to give it the satisfaction.

During that year I learned that you can be lonely and crowded at the same time. Every morning I woke to a parade. A girl from my course was on Instagram in a lanyard at a UN agency, captioned Blessed and grateful, new chapter. A boy who had copied my Research Methods notes had announced on Facebook that he was now an Assistant Manager. Someone from my hall had flown to Dubai for a job and posted a photo of her feet beside a hotel pool. There was an introduction ceremony in Mukono, all the gomesis in the same gold fabric. Somebody had a baby, and the baby had already been named and given a hashtag.

I would lie there and scroll, and with each photo I performed the same calculation, quick and silent. She had a lower GPA than me. He never attended lectures. She did not even want Makerere, she wanted Nkumba. It was a ledger, if I am honest, but a cruel one with only two columns: Them, and Me Still in Bed.

I did not post. Once I drafted a WhatsApp status that said God's timing is the best. I looked at it for a long time and deleted it, because I did not believe it and because I had a horror of the aunties reading it and decoding it correctly.

People still asked. That was the hardest part, harder than the regret emails. At a cousin's wedding in Entebbe, an auntie in a busuuti the colour of a traffic warning held both my hands and said, "Eh! Our graduate! So where are you working now?"

I had a script. "I'm doing some consultancy," I said.

"Consultancy!" She was delighted. "With who?"

"Different organisations," I said. "Short-term."

"Very good, very good. Keep it up." She patted my hand and moved on to interrogate someone's fiancé.

The consultancy, in case you were wondering, was one afternoon helping a friend's brother format a report in Microsoft Word. He paid me in chapati. I was not lying, exactly. I was doing what the plan had taught me to do, which was to keep the outside clean.

On the drive home, Mama said, "You looked smart today." Then, after a while, looking out of the window at Lake Victoria going grey in the evening: "Your time is coming. Just keep pushing. Those who work hard..." She finished the saying, the one from chapter two, the one I had copied into the inside cover of the exercise book in my best handwriting. I nodded. I had heard it all my life and it had always sounded like a promise. In the car that evening it sounded, for the first time, like a question someone was asking me.

In the seventh month I changed strategy. I am telling you this plainly because it is the moment I am least proud of and most understand.

I stopped applying for jobs I wanted. I started applying for anything.

My table came down off the wall. I did not need to track outcomes when the strategy was volume. I sent my CV to a clearing and forwarding company, a microfinance outfit in Kikuubo, a hotel in Kansanga that needed a "Guest Relations Officer" (receptionist). I applied to a betting company that needed a "Customer Engagement Associate" (a girl at a counter taking money from boda men). I tried a radio station's sales department and a supermarket. Yes, a supermarket. I applied for the shop. My twelve-year-old self wrote Not a shop in brackets, and in the seventh month I printed my transcripts and walked them into the shop.

The supermarket did not call either.

Then, finally, something did. A "research firm" in Kamwokya, run from two rooms above a salon, needed data collectors for a three-month survey. The interview took eleven minutes. The man asked if I had a smartphone and if I could start Monday. On Monday I signed a contract that I read twice and understood once. It promised a monthly "facilitation" of four hundred thousand shillings, to be paid "upon completion of deliverables." It did not mention transport, which turned out to mean that transport was my problem. It did not mention what would happen if the client was slow to pay the firm. That turned out to mean the money would be very, very slow.

For three months I walked. I walked in Kawempe and Bwaise with a tablet that belonged to the firm, knocking on doors and asking women how many meals their household ate per day. I walked in the rain and the dust and the rain again. A man set his dog on me in Kazo. A woman in Bwaise gave me water and asked whether I had finished school, and when I told her Makerere she clicked her tongue and said, "Then why are you walking?"

I did not have an answer for her. I wrote it down in the notebook I carried, under the questionnaire codes. Then why are you walking. It was the only thing I wrote in that notebook that was not a number.

At the end of three months, the firm paid one month. The man above the salon said the rest was "being processed." I went back four times. On the fourth time the salon girls told me, kindly, that he had moved his office. Nobody knew where. One of them offered to do my hair at a discount.

I said yes. I don't know why. I sat in her chair for two hours while she braided, and I watched myself in the mirror the whole time. I was trying to work out who that was, a woman with a first-class degree in her handbag and her feet aching from three months of walking for free. The girl braiding was talking about her boyfriend, and laughing a lot, and at one point she said something genuinely funny about him and the whole salon cracked up. I smiled. The girl looked at me in the mirror and said, "Auntie, you don't laugh?"

I had been told all my life that I had a big laugh. You could hear it from the gate, Mama used to say. My friends at Makerere called it my horn.

"I'm tired," I said. She nodded, and went on braiding.

He called that week, the first time in a while. He had found something, he said. A job with a sugar company near home. Small, but a start. I congratulated him, and I meant it, and something in me went quiet and cold at the same time, like a room when the power goes.

"And you?" he asked.

I told him about the research firm, the walking, the man above the salon. I did not do the voices this time.

"These people," he said. Then: "You'll find something."

"Yes," I said.

There was a pause. In the old days he would have filled it by fixing something: a torch, a socket, a radio left on the windowsill. I could hear him wanting to. I could hear that there was nothing in reach.

"I'll call you," he said.

He did, a few more times, and then less. One day I noticed that I had stopped waiting for it. I could not tell you the date. There was no last call. There was a call, and then there wasn't one, and the space where the next call would have been just went on being a space.

That is the whole story of how it ended, and I have told it to friends who wanted a villain, and I watched them be disappointed. There was no other woman that I knew of. There was no cruelty. There were two young people in two towns with not enough money and too much silence, and one of them was carrying something she had never said aloud, and the silence turned out to be heavier than either of them could lift.

The first time the question came, it was so quiet I almost didn't recognise it as a question.

I was sitting on my bed at Mama's with the red flash disk in my hand, turning it over. The plastic had cracked near the cap from being carried in too many handbags. I had opened the CV to update it, as I did every few weeks, because I believed that the right font might be the thing standing between me and the office. I looked at the page. Education: Makerere University, second-class upper. Awards. Positions held: hall representative, secretary of a student association, the debate club. Work experience: Data Collector (Contract), three months.

I looked at that page for a long time, and a voice in me, very calm, said: Is this all there is to you?

Then, a little later: If nobody wants this, what is it worth?

I didn't argue. That is what frightens me, looking back. The girl who wrote the plan argued with everybody. She argued with teachers, with aunties, with the very idea of Kyambogo. At twenty-four, with a degree that was supposed to be the proof, I sat on my bed and let the question stand there, like an uninvited relative who has decided to spend the night.

I want to be careful here, and honest. That question was the beginning of something that got much worse, and I will tell you about it in its place, slowly and plainly. For now I'll tell you only what changed in what I did. I stopped going to the Sunday service at our church, the one where everyone knew me, and started slipping into a crowded evening service across town where nobody did. I stopped picking up when the girls from my hall group called. I muted the group. I turned down a cousin's introduction ceremony with a story about a job interview that did not exist. Mama looked at me across the dining table one evening as I pushed matooke around the plate. She said, in her way, "A goat that does not eat has something in its stomach." I said I was fine. I was very good at saying I was fine. I had been practising since chapter seven.

So here is the ledger for item six, as I have drawn it this morning.

Planned: Get a good job with a office and a desk and my name on the door. Work hard and they will promote you.

Happened: Forty-three applications in two months, then I stopped counting. Two interviews, one of them for a job that already belonged to a board member's niece. One afternoon of "consultancy," paid in chapati. Three months of walking for a man who disappeared above a salon. A relationship that faded with no last call. A red flash disk with a cracked cap.

Paid: Transport money I did not have. Three hours and forty minutes in a reception. The Sunday service where people knew my name. My hall group. My laugh, or at least the volume of it. The belief that "they" were watching and keeping score. Most of my confidence that I was anyone at all once the grades stopped counting.

I am leaving the Paid column exactly like that for now, all debts and no credits. I know there are people who will tell you every loss is secretly a lesson. I am not ready to audit it that way, and I will not pretend to be on your behalf.

Revised (in pencil): Look for work that pays, including work I said I was too good for. Keep the table, but put the outcomes in the table and not in my chest.

I wrote that in pencil, in small letters, and then I sat and looked at it. It is not wise yet. It is barely a sentence. Twelve-year-old me would have crossed it out for lack of capital letters.

If you're living inside some version of this, the red flash disk, the auntie in the traffic-warning busuuti, the phone going quiet, I want to give you one thing to do this week. It isn't a cure. It's a measuring tool, the kind I wish I'd had in the seventh month.

Find your version of my table, the job applications, the CVs sent, the people you called. If you never kept one, make it from memory tonight. Then add one column my table never had. Call it What it cost to apply. For each row, write down honestly what that one application took from you: the transport, the airtime, the waiting, the swallowing of pride, the lie you told the auntie afterwards. Use a pen, because it happened.

Then count the rows where the cost was higher than anything you could have got back. Don't do anything about them yet. Just count.

Mine came to eleven out of the forty-three I could remember. Eleven times I paid more to be rejected than the job would have paid me in its first week. I stared at that number for a long time on the bed, with the cracked flash disk beside me and Mama's radio going in the sitting room. Then I did something I had not done in months. I picked up the phone and unmuted the hall group, without sending anything. I just let the messages come in, all two hundred and six of them, and I sat there and let them come.