Item 8: Get a Master's (Again, Apparently)

8. Do masters straight after degree. No break. Breaks are where people lose there focus and start selling tomatoes. Then PhD. Then I will be Dr. and even the uncles will have to call me Dr.

The ink on this one is a slightly different blue, which tells me I wrote it on another day, with another pen, after another lunch where an uncle said something. I know which uncle. He is still alive and still has opinions about women who "over-study." That last sentence was written for him personally, like a letter to be opened in twenty years.

You will remember that item five already asked for a master's. Item eight asks again, louder, with a PhD bolted on and a vendetta against tomatoes. I seem to have worried that the universe hadn't heard me the first time. So this is the second master's in the plan. It is the first one in real life. Honestly, those numbers are about right.

The admission email came on a Tuesday at 2:47 in the afternoon. I know the time because my phone was charging on the shelf across the room, face down, and I heard it buzz and didn't get up.

I want you to sit with that for a second, because I had to. In chapter four I told you about the night the undergraduate list came out. I had refreshed the Makerere admissions page until my phone died, then borrowed my brother's, then walked to a kiosk with a printed copy taped to the window, and read my name off the glass in the dark under a single bulb while a man buying paraffin asked if I was all right. I was seventeen and I had made the list my entire personality for one evening, and possibly for the following four years.

This time the phone buzzed. I was halfway through peeling matooke for Mama, who was in the next room arguing with a radio presenter. I finished the bunch. I washed my hands. Then I turned the phone over and read: We are pleased to inform you that you have been admitted to the Master of Arts in Social Sector Planning and Management (Evening).

I read it twice. I put the phone back down, face down, and went to tell Mama, who said "Praise God," turned the radio down by roughly one decibel, and asked whether the evening classes meant I would be coming home in the dark, and who would be bringing me.

Then I went to my room, took the blue Picfare out of the drawer, slid the strawberry stump out of the spine, and opened a fresh double page.

Before I applied, I had run the decision through the ledger. Pencil, four columns, the way I showed you last chapter. Only this row felt different to write, because the Planned column wasn't a dead girl's wish anymore. It was a thing I could still decide. That had never occurred to me: the ledger could face forward. It could be used on a live decision.

Here is the row, copied out exactly, crooked lines and all:

PLANNED · HAPPENED · PAID · REVISED

Masters straight after degree. Then PhD. Then "Dr." so the uncles have to say it. · Degree, then four years of unemployment, the grey season, the night I stayed. No masters. No Dr. The uncle still talks. · Paid: time, money, a lot of me. Got: knowing what I can't survive on, which is a plan with no room in it. · Apply for the evening master's. As an experiment, not a rescue. If it starts eating me, I am allowed to stop.

I underlined "experiment" in pencil, which is the gentlest form of shouting.

The word mattered. The first time I went to Makerere I went as a soldier. I called it the fortress strategy: lecture, library, hostel, church, repeat; no parties, no friends who weren't useful, no detours, the plan as walls and myself as the guard who never slept. You know how that ended. It held until it didn't, and when it fell it fell on me.

An experiment is a different animal. You run it to find something out, and if the result is "this doesn't work," you have still succeeded at the experiment. No uncle in history has ever been impressed by that logic. I was counting on that.

The fees structure arrived as a PDF titled, with real optimism, "FeesFINALv3_revised." Tuition for the year, functional fees, a research fee, an examination fee, a "development" fee that develops I don't know what, a library fee for a library I had already practically lived in, and a graduation fee due two years in advance, as if the university had been burned before by people who finished and then refused to pay for the gown.

I sat with a calculator and a mug of tea gone cold and did the arithmetic. I had a part-time contract with a small research NGO in Ntinda, data entry and some report-writing, paid monthly when the donor funds came in and quarterly when they didn't. I had savings that would make a bank laugh politely. I had a sister-in-law who had once said, at Christmas, "If you ever need anything, just tell me," in the tone people use to mean the opposite.

The old me would have had a solution by midnight. She would have taken a loan from the SACCO, borrowed from three aunties, promised the NGO extra hours she didn't have, and drawn up a timetable in which sleep appeared on Sundays, briefly, between second service and supper. She would have called it sacrifice. She would have been proud of it.

I opened the exercise book again.

This is the part I most want you to see, because it's the least glamorous. Using the ledger on the past is like reading your own medical file: painful, illuminating, safely over. Using it on a live decision is like standing at the counter of a supermarket with too many items in your basket and the cashier waiting. You have to decide now, with people behind you.

PLANNED · HAPPENED · PAID · REVISED

Pay the whole first year up front. Loan + aunties + extra NGO hours. · (Not yet. This is me deciding.) · If I do it the old way: debt, three aunties with stories to tell at weddings, no sleep, and the grey coming back by second semester. · Pay semester one only. Ask the NGO about a payment plan for the rest. Tell ONE auntie, the one who doesn't talk. No extra hours.

"Happened" was empty. I wrote "Not yet" in it and stared at the gap for a long time. It's a strange column to leave blank. It made the row feel unfinished, which it was, which was the point.

I went to the NGO director the following Monday. She was a brisk woman from Mbarara who wore reading glasses on a beaded chain and treated every meeting as if it were costing her a goat. I had rehearsed. I told her I'd been admitted, that I wanted to stay on, that I could not take more hours, and that I wondered whether the organisation's staff development budget, which I knew existed because I had typed it into a spreadsheet, might cover a portion of the fees.

She looked at me over the glasses. "You typed that budget line."

"I did."

"So you know how much is in it."

"I know how much was in it in March."

She laughed, a short bark, and said she would take it to the board. The board, which met when it met, took it under advisement, which in Ugandan institutional language means "we have placed it in a drawer and will check on it as one checks on a sleeping baby: rarely, and with fear." Three weeks later they agreed to forty percent of tuition on condition that I stayed two years after graduating.

Two years. I came home and wrote that in the Paid column, and next to it, smaller: That is not nothing. But it is not a cage either. You can leave a job. You couldn't leave the fortress because you were the fortress.

I paid semester one. I told one auntie, Auntie Joyce, the one who hears things and lets them die in her like seeds in dry soil. She sent fifty thousand shillings on mobile money with the message "for books. dont thank me just pass." I didn't thank her. I passed.

Evening classes at Makerere are a different country from the one I lived in at nineteen. They begin at 5:30, which in Kampala traffic means people arrive at 5:30 in spirit and 6:15 in body, sweating, carrying office bags and lunchboxes with the remains of lunch in them. My classmates were a nurse from Mulago, two district planners, a man from a ministry who wore a suit every single evening as though the lecture might be audited, a pastor's wife doing it "so that people stop asking what I do," and a twenty-four-year-old who had come straight from undergrad and who reminded me so painfully of myself that I had to stop sitting near her.

She colour-coded. She had a planner with tabs. In the first week she asked the lecturer whether there would be a reading list for the reading list. On the second Tuesday she told me she had a five-year plan and asked about mine.

I said, "I have a twenty-year-old one. I'm editing it."

She looked at me the way you look at someone who has just admitted to eating cold rice for breakfast. Which I also had, that morning, but she didn't need to know.

The first month went well. Suspiciously well. I went to class Monday to Thursday, worked at the NGO in the mornings, came home by boda with a reflector jacket Mama insisted on (she bought it from a man at Wandegeya who also sold, from the same mat, phone covers, rat poison, and a framed portrait of the Kabaka from roughly 1995). I submitted the first assignment early. I got a high mark. The lecturer wrote "Excellent analysis" in the margin.

And something old woke up in me.

I don't know how else to describe it. It was like hearing a song from secondary school on the radio, a song you thought you had outgrown, and finding your foot already tapping. The high mark made me want another high mark. Another one would make me want a distinction. A distinction would mean I should be reading on Fridays. If I was reading on Fridays, I should drop Sunday lunch at Mama's, which was three hours I could use for the literature review I hadn't been assigned yet. I could wake at five. I could. I had done it before.

In the second month, without telling anyone, I drew up a timetable.

I found it recently, folded inside a notebook, and I'll tell you what was on it because I think it's funny now, and because I don't think it was funny at the time. Wake at 4:45. Read 5:00 to 6:30. NGO 8:00 to 1:00. Lunch "while reading." Library 2:00 to 5:00. Class. Home, review notes until midnight. Saturdays: assignments, laundry, "one hour of rest (optional)." Sundays: church, Mama's, "bring articles."

Optional rest. In brackets. Like a side salad.

I followed it for eleven days. On the twelfth, a Thursday, I sat in the back of a lecture on participatory budgeting and could not make the words on the slides go into my head. They kept arriving and leaving, like passengers who'd got into the wrong taxi. I went home and lay on the bed in my clothes, shoes on, bag still on my shoulder. I told myself I would rest for ten minutes.

I woke at 3 a.m. with the light on.

Friday I didn't go to the NGO. I sent a message saying I had a headache, which was true in the way that saying a house fire is "a temperature issue" is true. I didn't open the readings. I didn't eat until the afternoon, and then it was a single chapati Mama sent up with my brother, who put it on my desk, looked at me, looked at the timetable taped above the desk, and left without saying anything, and I heard him say to Mama in the corridor, quietly, "She's doing the thing."

Saturday was worse. Not the old worst. I need to say that plainly, because I know some of you will read this with your hearts in your mouths. The heaviest thoughts didn't come back. But I could feel the shape of the grey season in the room the way you can feel rain before it comes, a weight in the air, a flatness. I recognised it. I'd lived in it for two years. I knew its furniture.

By Saturday evening I had an assignment due Monday, which I hadn't started, and a strong, practised urge to do what I had always done: stay up all of Sunday, skip Mama's, skip church, make it up in one punishing night, hand it in at 8 a.m. with red eyes and pride. Win.

Here is what I did instead, and I am going to tell it in the order it happened, not the order that would make me look wise.

First I cried, which was not part of any strategy.

Then I got off the bed. I want to be clear that this took a long time and that there was no music.

Then I sat at the desk, took down the timetable, and did not tear it up, because I was too tired to perform. I laid it flat. I opened the exercise book beside it. I took out the pencil, which was short by then, sharpened on one side with a razor blade because my sharpener had gone missing in the general way of sharpeners. I wrote a new row, right there, Saturday night, with the light on and the chapati plate still on the desk.

PLANNED · HAPPENED · PAID · REVISED

The timetable. 4:45 to midnight. Distinction. "Rest (optional)." · 11 days. Then the bed with my shoes on. Missed work Friday. Assignment not started. Brother said I'm "doing the thing." · Two days. One lie to my boss. The grey came close enough to smell. Got: I noticed it on day 12, not month 12. · Email lecturer tonight. Tell boss the truth Monday. Go to Mama's tomorrow. Sleep. The timetable gets a pencil too.

Then I did the items, in order, while I still had the nerve.

The email to the lecturer took forty minutes to write and was four sentences long. The first draft was a page and a half and included the phrase "unforeseen personal circumstances," which is the phrase every student in history has used to mean "my life." I deleted it. I wrote:

Dear Dr. Ssekandi, I'm not going to make Monday's deadline. I have a history of depression and this week it caught up with me. I can submit by Thursday. I understand if there is a penalty.

I looked at "history of depression" for a long time. I had never written it to anyone with authority over my marks. In Uganda you do not hand a lecturer a sentence like that. You hand him a medical form from a clinic where your cousin's friend works. My finger hovered. I thought about the pastor's wife, the man in the suit, the colour-coded girl, and what they would think if they knew. They would never know. That was the thing about lecturers. They were sealed envelopes.

I pressed send. I put the phone face down on the shelf. I went to sleep.

He replied on Sunday morning, before church: Thursday is fine. No penalty. Take care of yourself. — A.S. Fourteen words. I read them in the queue for the bathroom and had to lean on the wall.

I went to church. I sat through a sermon about the parable of the talents, which was, for my purposes, an aggressive choice. I went to Mama's for Sunday lunch, which in practice is my own home plus every relative within a twelve-kilometre radius. Mama asked how the course was going. I said, "It's hard, Mama. I overdid it this week." She looked at me, put another piece of chicken on my plate without asking, and said, "Then eat," which is the closest she comes to a counselling session, and is honestly a better one than some I've paid for.

I didn't bring articles.

On Monday I went into the NGO and told the director that I hadn't had a headache on Friday, that I'd had a bad depressive episode, that I was okay now, and that I'd make up the hours. She took her glasses off, which she had never done in my presence, and the chain swung against her chest, and for a moment she looked like an ordinary tired woman instead of a budget line.

"My son," she said. "Last year." She didn't finish. She put the glasses back on. "Make up the hours when you're able. Not this week."

I said thank you. She waved me out like I was costing her a goat, which by then I understood was how she expressed affection.

I want to tell you that the timetable went in the bin and I've lived in perfect balance ever since. You would close the book. You'd be right to.

What actually happened is that I rewrote the timetable, in pencil, on the back of the old one, so the two would always be in the same piece of paper. Wake at 6:30. NGO mornings. Library two afternoons a week, not five. Class. Home by nine, food, no reading after ten. Saturday: one assignment block, laundry, and then whatever. Sunday: church if I feel like it, Mama's always.

And at the bottom, a new line I'd never had on any timetable in my life: Thursday night: ledger.

That one line is the part I'd hand you if I could only hand you one. Thursday evenings, after class, I sit with the exercise book for fifteen minutes and write a row about the week. It's not an epic row. Sometimes the Planned column says "finish chapter two," and the Happened column says "finished half of chapter two and watched four episodes of a Nigerian series about a polygamous chief," and the Paid column says "lost three hours, gained a strong opinion about his third wife," and the Revised column says "finish the other half on Saturday. Also she was right to leave."

What I'm doing, I've realised, is maintenance. I used to think healing was a door you went through: you were sick, and then you were on the other side, cured, testifying. It's more like a boda. You have to check the tyres. Oil it. Keep it out of the rain when you can. You'll still have to push it up the hill some days. You learn which noises mean trouble. Mine, it turns out, is a timetable with "optional" written next to rest.

There have been setbacks since. One week in the second semester I skipped the Thursday ledger three times in a row and didn't notice until I found myself, on a Sunday, at the library at 7 a.m. with my bag full of articles and a lie for Mama ready on my tongue. I went home. I went to lunch. I wrote the row that night, late. The Revised column said only: You know this road. Turn around sooner.

My classmate with the tabs got a distinction in the first semester. I got a B-plus and a merit, which, if I'm honest, still stings a little in the place where the twelve-year-old lives. I'll tell you what I didn't get: a second week on the bed with my shoes on. I'll take that trade. The uncle can wait for his "Dr." He's waited this long.

So what does success look like now? I've had to rebuild the definition from scratch, like a house after a flood, using whatever was still standing.

Success right now is a Thursday ledger I actually write. It's an email with true sentences in it. It's leaving the phone face down when it buzzes, because whatever it says will still say it after I finish peeling the matooke. It's paying one semester, not four. Some weeks it's eating the chicken. It's a timetable with rest on it and no brackets.

At seventeen, success was a name on a list taped to a kiosk window, and I was so afraid of not finding it that I read it in the dark rather than wait for morning. This time my name came in an email at 2:47 on a Tuesday, and I finished the matooke first.

That's the difference I can measure. I don't trust the others yet.

If you're holding a decision right now — whether to apply, whether to take the loan, whether to say yes to the extra project at work, whether to tell someone — I'd like you to try the ledger facing forward this week. You don't need a Picfare. Any paper with lines on it will do, and a pencil, and something to rub out with.

Write what the old plan would have you do in the Planned column. Be honest about how loud it is. Write "Not yet" in Happened, and leave it there. In Paid, write what the old way would cost you, and be specific, down to the aunties and the hours of sleep, and then write the one thing you might gain if you did it differently. In Revised, write the smallest version of the decision you can actually live with. One semester, not four. One person told, not the whole family.

Then put a date in the corner, a week from now, and come back to it. Fill in Happened when it has happened. You'll be surprised how often the true entry is kinder than the one you feared, and how often it isn't, and how either way you'll at least know.

I have to go. It's Thursday, and the second-semester fees are due in three weeks, and the board, which meets when it meets, still hasn't told me whether the forty percent covers the research fee. The row is already half-written. Planned: panic. Revised: email the director in the morning, ask plainly, and go to bed.