Ekyozi kya Jose

He picks up a piece of cooked pumpkin, a portion of the huge pumpkin that our mother had given us a few days ago when we visited her.As he eats, a piece of it falls to the tiled floor of the pantry in the apartment that we share. Picking it up it, he says,

 “I will not forgive this piece because I labored to carry it all the way from the village!”

 That said, he pops the deserter piece into his mouth!

I laugh as I watch on, sited on a chair on the other side of the pantry. I laugh because that is typical Jose-he always finds ways of drawing humor from every situation.

Moments later, when as he asks me, what pumpkin is in runyankore, a language commonly spoken in the Western parts of Uganda, I am surprised but not shocked at the randomness of the question or how his mind had wandered all the way from the apartment to western Uganda.

“Ekyozi,” I respond to his question “…like Jose (Jozie),” I add with muffled bouts of laughter.

In that moment of lingering humor, I am reminded of a famous childhood story about the day my older sister ate Joseph’s piece of left over pumpkin that he had kept for later, when he returned from his childhood “conquests”. 

Now that was the time and  age when Joseph used to bite everyone who offended him! This time, my sister got the sharp mark from the infamous  incisors before she realised that something needed to be done to remedy the situation. Luckily enough, we had a whole garden of pumpkin in the backyard and as you might have already guessed, this was my sister’s saving grace. Following my mother’s advice, she quickly ran to the backyard garden and harvested one pumpkin and quickly steamed it, the way most food is prepared in central Uganda. All this she did with a wailing Jose at her bumper, until she replaced the eaten “ekyozi” before the strife escalated into a raging war of incisors.

Today, Jose no longer bites people with his sharp tiny incisors when he is upset like he used to, but he still loves his pumpkin so much that he would still do overt acts like picking a fallen piece of pumpkin off the floor back onto his plate or even his mouth!

I hope Jose gets to enjoy the better things life has to offer from a wide golden platter; so that when all these good things spill over, and fall unto the people down below, he will let them, so that those people share in his blessings too. More so, I hope to tell this story to little “Joses” one day; the story of “ekyozi Kya Jose.”