After three weeks of a really memorable holiday, I had nothing on my lips but songs of praise and honor for my father in Hoima. He is such a great father, the best father that I know in this world. Yet a few years ago I detested him to the core, I hated him with a passion just because I had never bothered to find out who my father was.

 I had chosen to focus on the negatives. I hated him so much that sometimes I would even regret why our father in heaven had made me a son of such a tough, hard and unappreciative workaholic. He is an extremely hardworking man. In his house, you can only be a visitor for one day. Beyond that you will be given a hoe to do some work for him.
 He is a farmer who spends not less than eight hours a day at his farm. By 6:00am he is always on his farm and the earliest he gets off that farm is 2:00pm. On some days, the work could stretch up to 7:00pm in the evening.
 His sons and daughters had no option but to be fitted into such a system of extreme hard work. Unfortunately for me, I was relatively a lazy fool and I was not as energetic as the workload required of me.
As a result I always thought our father was simply punishing us when he made us stay in the gardens for all those hours and when he rudely woke us up on cold mornings to go for work.
I was not the only one who disliked him. All his children did because at times when other people’s sons and daughters would be enjoying the sweet life in the city and towns of this country, we were being made to work like donkeys.
All his life as a farmer, he had never dreamt of owning a tractor because when we stepped unto those gardens he made us clear the lands like tractors. Sometimes we thought that he never looked at us as his sons and daughters but as his laborers that would help him in his tedious labor.
That is what made us dislike him. However over the years I realized that that was not the case. On the contrary, our father loved us so deeply and he always desired that as we grew up we understood the essence of hard work. He worked very hard because he wanted us to go to the best schools and have the best education that we could have simply because he had missed out on his education.
His father blatantly refused to educate his children and he was one of them. He always regretted that fact and that is what always drove him to work so hard. Being uneducated as he was, his only source of hope was the hoe and he had to handle it with all the energy. It was not until some of us realized this fact that our attitudes towards him changed. That explains why I went back this holiday, ready to help him and to do all the hard work in his gardens and I enjoyed every single second of that holiday.
Yes, there were times when I sweated plasma during that short holiday. For example, the day I had to carry those six bags of ground nuts from the garden just across my slightly bent neck and two shoulders unto his pickup truck.
By the time I was done, I felt like I had grown a few inches shorter but I am delighted that at the end of it all we had harvested seven bags of ground nuts plus clearing around five acres of land. We also planted beans on about two acres of the land cleared.
However the most exciting moment of it all was that day when we celebrated his 50th birthday, it was such an exciting 28th day of December. It was also time to reflect and when I saw the mansion that my uneducated father owned, the over 10 acres trees that he had planted, the truck, the land, the education that his children were receiving and so many other things.
 I saw a bright future ahead of this uneducated man. I knelt right there to ask for forgiveness from both my earthly and heavenly father because of how ungrateful I had been to my earthly father, for the days when I had defiantly refused to go back to Hoima to help him in his work.
I thought it was not worth it and for all the silly things I had always blathered against my father. Fortunately both the fathers were willing to forgive me.
That is all I can say about that holiday. I think it was better way to spend a short holiday than leaving my bones languishing in the city doing nothing helpful to this nation. Wasn’t it?