Express Yourself and Rediscover the Magic of Lover Letter Writing With The #MuwadoLoveLetter18 Challenge

In 2015 and 2016, Muwado hosted the Love Letter Writing challenge to celebrate Valentine ’s Day and the season of love. This challenge has so far produced 38 love letters that took different forms thanks to the creative license submitters were given. Poems, short stories, not so short stories, a friend zone type letter… The letters were also addressed to different people. Wives/Husbands, side dishes, crushes, Cupid, Parents, friends with benefits, potentials… The variety is part of the appeal.

In 2015, the eventual winner, Your Guardian Angel by Dennis Asiimwe, was a long read that took on story format and had an unexpected ending that had several spectators singing praises for its creativity. It was shared an astonishing 1990 times across various social media and got him the top prize of Ushs 1m. The second and third places were taken by Carolyne Ecstatic and Kidron KlaFella, respectively, whose entries were both poems. The other top 10 entries took home an assortment of gifts from the co-sponsors of the competition, Crown Beverages Limited which brings you Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Mirinda, 7UP and Evervess. Smart Telecom, the other sponsor, also gave smartphones to 3 entries that got special mention from the winners, i.e ‘She has me, questioning my sexuality‘ by Jacky Kemigisha, ‘Forbidden in Eden‘ by Gloria Lyt and ‘My Love is Not Afraid‘ by Roxanna Aliba.

In 2016 it was changed to a challenge format due to lack of a sponsor and we understandably got fewer submissions with the monetary reward removed. Still, Cafe Pape jumped on board and rewarded one of the participants, Muwado member @pb_knight, whose submission, Demens in Amore, they liked with their Valentines Day dinner package!

2017 passed by without an edition and, after quite a bit of demand from past participants and readers, we are reviving it in 2018 in the challenge form because Valentines is still going to happen and love must be celebrated, goddammit. It will now be an annual challenge without fail and we hope to see it grow bigger and better. The first one was restricted to Uganda because that’s where the sponsors were based but, going forward, it’s open to anyone anywhere that wants to participate.

Under the challenge arrangement, we hope participants will submit their entries without the pressure of trying to get people to like and share their post so they can win. We further hope that the submissions will be from people that are genuinely excited about the idea, that miss the good old days of love letter writing, before texting and sexting saturated it, and want to use the Valentines season as a way to relive those times and speak to someone that’s on their mind and heart. To spread the good cheer, all we ask is that you submit something and share it with a few friends that you think should be able to spin some love letter magic and ask them to do similarly.

We are talking to a few companies to see if they can partner in whatever ways they can so that the writers of some of the outstanding letters get something for their effort. If any of the said corporate entities bites, they will reward the composers of the letters they like, as opposed to the popularity contest model the first one took. If you are a sponsor or know a sponsor that is interested in rewarding people that have submitted their love letter, contact us here and we discuss further how to go about this. We’ll update this post in case of any developments.

So, without wasting any more time, why don’t we kick this one off? Instructions are as below.

Step 1.

Create/Login to Muwado account using any of the buttons below (ignore if already logged in)

Step 2.

Go to the new post page and create your masterpiece of a love letter. You can add #MuwadoLoveLetter18 to the title if you want but it is not compulsory. We’ll be keeping track of the submissions from that tag, though, so make sure you add it among the post tags. It’s also the official hashtag for the challenge so we encourage you to use it when sharing the posts on social media.

Step 3.

Publish and share your work of art with the world.

Aya, that’s all. Thank you for being a part of this. This challenge will officially run until the end of February 2018, but those that find out later and still want to post one are free to do so.