When you begin secondary school, at the age of thirteen or fourteen in Uganda, that’s when you enter adolescence. The body changes—boys start to grow beards—and with it comes the excitement of growing up. You start to act like a responsible young adult. Some even start to become sexually active at that age.
Under the influence of the community and various other social factors, a lot of adolescents tend to drop out of school. Young girls, excited by their bodies changing, give themselves to men and end up as pregnant teenagers. Meanwhile, us men experience a lot of life in these years. What these experiences are varies drastically, depending on what community or environment you live in.
It’s the most challenging stage of growth for a young man. A lot of boys end up in prison, for all sorts of reasons: theft, drug abuse, sex with an underage girl. Some even become drug addicts. That’s the age when a boy wants to explore life, for example by smoking cigars or marijuana or drinking alcohol, and if he is from a home with soft-spoken parents who have poor parenting skills, it eventually catches up with him.
Ojok was an orphan who went to live with his stepdad when he was a child. He didn’t listen to his stepdad, no matter what his advice was. He decided to drop out of school in senior two, when he was fourteen, because he was being bullied a lot: he would cry every morning on his way to school. He was a calm boy who didn’t talk much. When his fellow students knocked him on the head, he would just swallow the pain and wipe away his tears. He had such a hard time at school.
Luckily, Ojok didn’t fall in with the bad students who would have gotten him to drink alcohol or smoke, which would have eventually led to an addiction. He chose to drop out of school in order to start making money to support himself and to buy new clothes. Even though he was afraid of women, he knew that if a woman did cross his path, he would have to spend money on her too.
Instead of going to school, Ojok went to work in a sandpit in Coopil, Gulu District, close to where he lived. People in the region buy this pit sand for construction. Everyone uses it for houses and roads. The sand is so desirable, you can’t go a day without earning good money from mining it.
Gulu District is a rapidly developing region, an attractive place for residents and commercial businesses alike. The reason for this is that, since the end of the civil war in Uganda, Gulu has become one of the most peaceful cities in the northern part of the country. A lot of people from across Uganda come here to buy land and construct homes for their families. So Ojok was really in business.
Mining sand is very hard work. Everything is done manually, and it requires an energetic man to do it. They use hoes to dig the sand out of the pits, and spades to carry it up. They put the sand in heaps, and then cover and surround each heap with bricks, so that in case of heavy rainfall the sand is not washed away back into the pit. After that, they wash the sand two to three times to remove any impurities such as clay and silt. It should be pure sand, not even mixed with stone.
They have to wash the sand until it’s as bright as table salt. The reason being that when people buy sand, they look for the cleanest kind available, since pit sand is often used for plastering the walls of houses. So it has to be high-purity sand, and that’s the trickiest part of this business.
Ojok made a lot of money since he was very good at mining, and energetic too. At first, his stepdad discouraged him from mining, but soon he relented, because Ojok was making more and more money every day. With the money he earned, he opened up a grocery shop in the centre of Coopil, where he would sit after work and relax while making even more money.
This part of Ojok’s journey was so fulfilling that it brought out his manhood. The fear and anxiety of being with a woman disappeared; instead, his worries were about his family and work responsibilities. He had become the breadwinner at home, and a shoulder to lean on—in addition to his stepdad, he supported his stepbrother and sister, who were still in school. Out of all the adolescent boys from his old school, Ojok was the only one who had already taken on these responsibilities.
Ojok never lacked for anything. But he didn’t waste his money, he was saving it. He didn’t rush into marriage because he wanted to build up his finances first. Even though he was a school dropout, a lot of girls from the neighborhood admired him because of his ambition and the fact that he helped his family during illnesses and other crises.
After five years of constant work and financial and personal growth, Ojok bought a plot of land in the centre of Coopil, right next to the grocery store he ran, and constructed a house. He plastered the walls with sand he mined himself. When the house was finished, he felt that it was time to marry, since he was now capable of taking care of a woman. Adong, one of the most beautiful ladies from the neighborhood, did her shopping at Ojok’s grocery store almost every evening. She developed a crush on Ojok. They started talking, and that’s how they fell in love and decided to move in together.
Ojok is proof that a man can make it in life with or without an education. He just needs to put in the hard work for the greater good.
