I was born from a family of 17 children, and am the 9th child. I was able to go to school until my parents could no longer afford to raise school fees for me but at that level, I was able to read and write. When I could not be in school anymore, I left home because there were many children and most basic needs could not be met for us. I began to live with my uncle who was helping at a church with keeping it clean – we would go together to collect garbage from people’s homes and take it to the city garbage collection area.
My uncle was a devoted Christian and I spent most of the time with him, and I began to learn about Jesus and I accepted Him to be my savior and later I would fall again but again make confession after hearing the word again. Later when I had become a young adult I left my village to go and earn a living for myself, a peer of my friends led me into south Sudan in Juba city from where I joined a team of marijuana users and sellers, I eventually took a lot of it and I self-styled myself a raster man in 2011. The war in Juba had just started in 2010 when I arrived in that city. The assassins kept looking for Ugandans as the war was political, the Dincas never wanted Ugandans because they thought our government was against their war. As a raster and a drug dealer I grew my dreadlocks very long, and my skin became very black because of the excess sun in Juba. I resembled Kenyans, who they favored against Ugandans. When the soldiers abducted a group of us and they asked which country I was from, I hurried to say Kenya and they believed because of my physical appearance. The rest of my team was killed and I was just slapped and told to run. Realizing that death was knocking for me, I started to plan going back home as soon as possible. After six months I was in Uganda at home where I found that they had already mourned my death because they had never heard from me for five years.
In the meantime I started to visit church again while I kept getting a dream of a man who asked me why am I breaking his church but I did not understand, a year later I realized that while I owned nothing, my father had donated a property for a church to be built. I went with anger and I demolished a side wall of this church while I demanded for compensation because as a family we did not sign, I expected the pastor of this church to react with taking me to authorities, this man after watching me do what I had done he requested me to visit him at his house where I found out he had prepared a very nice meal for me and my brother. He welcomed us with a very smiling face and indeed he was happy to receive us. We had a great conversation in which we prayed together after and it was this impression that changed my whole life from a church persecutor to a pastor. I learnt from him that treating people with respect was and is very good because at that time everyone looked at me as a disgrace because of my past and how I was acting. I apologized for what I had done and went home peacefully. I cut off my long dreadlocks. I resumed reading my bible which I had bought to use for plucking out papers for smoking. I kept reading the few papers that had remained there.
I confessed Jesus as my personal savior again and shortly is when I received a phone call after 3 months of committing my life to Jesus, a phone call from my long time brother in Christ who opened the conversation with news that God was asking him to give a property to plant a church there, I had been in prayer and fasting asking God for my next step and Fidel called me at the 21st day. I accepted that this was an answer from the Lord. The journey of ministry was born from there and it’s when I got in contact with my pastors to help me get started in planting a church in Kyabagalagwa village which I currently pastor. We do baptism twice in a year and we baptize between 10 to 12 people. Children dedications are done when any parent has brought a child however a month like January, we have done 7 children dedications.
