Immaculate Auma

Success Story

As a little girl, Immaculate Auma was never really sure of the career path she wanted to take, given the fact that she was always good at almost everything. Whenever her dad hosted relatives, they would marvel at her grades and often asked, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”. “A doctor,” she would reply. She comes from a family line of teachers, farmers, tailors, engineers, policemen, among others, but no doctors. Most of whom branched off to do short courses after either form 4 (lower secondary) or form 6 (upper secondary). She has always been very ambitious, even without realizing it. From her kindergarten days, she often found herself in leadership roles. From being a pencil collector, to class monitor, then to debate prefect, climaxing to head girl in her primary school days. Teachers always made reference to her during class.
“Some of you will be walking to work while the likes of Immaculate will pass you by in their Range Rovers (type of car),” they would say. Words cannot explain the number of expectations that were laid on her plate from a tender age, which frightened her more than it encouraged her. “What if I let them down, or worse, let myself down,” she thought to herself. Slowly her fears begun to take shape sooner than anticipated.
Fast forward to 2017, she was crowned Miss YMCA, during her first year at YMCA Comprehensive Institute which she joined for a Diploma in Cosmetology. She had wanted to join university, but did not want her father to take out another loan to get her through university. She therefore settled for her second love i.e. “beauty.”

While at YMCA, she made sure to leave a mark not just as a beauty Queen, but went ahead to run for a guild position as a delegate for the cosmetology classduring her 2^nd year. After graduation, she got a job and her dream ofleaving a good life were reignited. She often dreamt of parking her Range Rover in the garage of her lavish Bangalow after a long day of business meetings with prominent people. She would imagine taking off her heels and diving into the bathtub to cool off as she ordered for a scrumptious meal to sum up the day. Little did she know that everything was about to go downhill from there.

Losing direction

Immaculate was blessed with twins and had to quit her job in her 3^rd trimester. “Nothing and no one had prepared me for the life of a mother” she remembers. The early morning sunrise was her biggest daily competitor, given the long list of chores that greeted her every single morning. She had to wash, clean, cook and attend to the twins every day of the week. She hardly caught sleep, given the babies’ cries and the multiple times shekept awake to breastfeed.

Depression, to herwas always been a white man’s disease, but in this season, she acknowledged the fact that it was no respecter of races. She cut off all her social circles, cried herself to sleep most nights and cut off attending church. “I became the queen of throwing the biggest pity parties” she retorts. She had never pictured herself as a full-time housewife. She would cringe at the mere imagination of it. Having watched many women duringher childhood neighborhood settling for a roof over their heads and a meal on their table, she had vowed never to walk down the same path.Well, there she was, watching her nightmares unfold before her own eyes as history clung onto her feet, dragging her back to a path she had sworn never to walk down.

Another bombshell

Shortly after she had encouraged herself out of that dump she wallowed in, she was ushered into another pit two years later. Her memory still plays back this record as though it was yesterday. She remembers lying on her bed out of breath from silent cries and her head thrummed with dizziness from wailing uncontrollably after receiving a report that she was again pregnant with another child. This news hit her so hard – she remembers falling so sick that she had to send the twins off to their grandmother’s place for a short while. The stress and disappointment in herself were too much to bear. She contemplated on leaving the father of the children who she wasn’t legally married to, but thekey questions were… where to? With what? And what next?

The Turning Point

After nights of sobbing, a window of opportunity opened when she received news that shecould be considered for a full scholarship to pursue a bachelor’s degree from someone she barely knew, but heard of, from a friend. She gasped for air and squealed with excitement as she could hardly believe the opportunity. “If this is a dream, somebody please don’t wake me up,” she thought to herself as she pinched her hand just to be sure she wasn’t day dreaming.

A few days later, she emailed the person behind this “restoration” project. She typed, deleted, typed, paraphrased, deleted and typed again…the only thing running through her mind at the time was, “this email ought to be perfect, first impression can cause a lasting impression.”

After a few online interactions, she was admitted at Uganda Christian Universityfor a bachelor degree in journalism, media and communications. This was not her first choice but as fate would have it, it’s where her journey in communications would begin. Her tuition, rent and upkeep for her day-to-day needs were fully paid. This meant a lot for a young lady who almost threw in the towel on her dreams.

Time at university

Immaculate joined university when she was about 3-4 months pregnant. She never told anyone, not even her sponsor for fear of losing the scholarship. At the university, she was greeted with Bible verses inscribed on the walls of almost every building. From the gate, to the university resident halls and some classroom buildings. She breathed a sigh of relief believing that this new chapter was going to be a smooth ride of redemption and a personal apology to herself. Her little naïve mind hadn’t braced her for the huddles ahead.

She did well in her first semester examinations, achieving a cumulative grade point average (CGPA) of 4.58. Everything seemed to be going according to plan until her 2^nd semester when her baby bump became more visible, so did the threats of continuing her education. Uganda Christian University has a policy in the student conduct code which stipulates that unmarried pregnant women shall be guilty of an offense and are forced to take a ‘dead year’. Taking a dead year was certainly not an option for her at the time because she figured it could risk her scholarship and thus had to work around it.

She would wake up by 5am every morning so that she couldquickly go through the security checks very early for the security guards to notice her bump. She always tried to enter class before any lecturer walked in to avoid any suspicions. It was so tiring keeping up this routine but she was so determined to pay any price to get that degree, even if it meant playing hide and seek in her condition.

Unfortunately, one chilly morning, she was stopped by a female security guard who was observant enough to notice her condition and saw no ring on her finger. She encouraged her to take a dead semester or else she would personally do the honors of reporting her case to the administration. Immaculate was shaken with fear to the core. She was just a few months away from giving birth so she locked in, and braced herself for whatever would come because a dead semester or year was the last thing on her mind.

Five weeks to her2nd semester final examinations, she was in the hospital washrooms sobbing uncontrollably after the final scan showed that she would undergo another caesarean section. It brought back the pain and depression she went through after her first pregnancy. The woman in the mirror was unrecognizable and the healing journey felt like a decade. At that time, she wasn’t even sure if her scars had healed enough for another rollercoaster of blurred emotions, she didn’t know how to make sense of it, so she just cried over and over.

Later that evening, she held her precious baby in her arms as some friends sat next to her bed, congratulating her and reminding her of coursework that was due. She sometimes had to coordinateher group members online while admitted, recovering from a surgery where she lost a lot of blood and weight.

Shortly after being discharged, shefocused on submitting any other pending assignments while attending to her little one at home. She was also blessed to have two amazing friends who made time every evening to come over so as to help her catch up on what had been taught in class.

Her recovery was very quick, and within about three weeks, she was back on her feet, ready to tackle the end-of-semester examinations. At the end of that season, she scored 4.5 CGPA with honors in stress management. That period she learnt much more about life than she ever did in a classroom, and gratitude is an understatement of the emotions that lingered in that room while she held those results in her hands.

She juggled school and her other responsibilities the best she could until God was gracious enough to allow their grandmother to step in to take all her babies so she could “concentrate.”

She knew better than to waste another opportunity to maximize her time at campus. She went on to contest and win the Speaker position for the Media Link Association, an umbrella student body for all journalism and communications students in the university.

Adding icing to that cake, she was also selected among the top 26 journalism students across the country to participate in the Media Challenge Initiative fellowship. This opened up her mind to countless possibilities in her field of study and interacting with top students from other universities also allowed her to learn new ideologies that would later shape her future pursuits.

Her final year at university moved on well with a few bumpy huddles, but nothing she couldnot manage. She graduated with a total average CGPA OF 4.60, ranking 2^nd best in her course of study and 32^nd best in the entire university.

Looking back now, it’s true what they say, what doesn’t kill one makes them stronger. So, while a new chapter awaits, she is grateful for all that life has taught her up to this point, the giants who have offered their shoulders for her to step on, so that she can be lifted to heights she could have never accomplished byher own strength.

Her heartfelt gratitude extends especially to her sponsor, Brian Ssebunya, who stepped in like a father to save the crushed dreams of a stranger. Throughout her school days, anxiety had become her best friend because the question of tuition always made her heart race. Some of her worst memories from school were those when the headmaster would come with a long list of “school fees defaulters,” and that list was always incomplete without her name on it.

Being able to wake up every morning, with the question of tuition being ticked off her problem list, gave her an undeniable relief that fueled her zeal for a better tomorrow more than she ever imagined.

“While life plays the tunes at different rhythms, I choose to keep dancing. For yesterday is a memory, tomorrow remains a mystery, but today is a gift that I cherish” she says while rejoicing.

“Many heroes, heroines, and villains have that one turning point among a series of events that shaped their current world. For some, it’s the sting of pain, a stretched-out hand, the unexpected kindness of a stranger, while for others it’s pangs of failure, disappointment, or even a random connection, but for me, it was the shoulders of unexpected giants”, she recollects.

The 25^thof October, 2024, marked the climax of her 3-year journey of pursuing a Bachelor degree in Journalism, Media and Communication at Uganda Christian University. And recently, she has been lucky to win a scholarship to pursue her master degree at a university outside Uganda.