Imagine a field full of tall, colorful flowers. Bright roses and tall green sunflower stalks crowd the large patch of dirt. This is her garden that her family maintains every day, and where her and her friends and cousins would play hide and seek. She didn’t grow up here, instead she grew up on land completely different from ours, Uganda.

Freshman Charlote Namakula moved to America when she was just ten years old, coming to stay with her father who had already moved here and found a job. He felt it was incomplete without the rest of his family, so Charlote and her family made their way to Chicago.

“There were trees everywhere in Uganda! There was no pavement like there is here, and if there was any, it was all broken, cracked, and useless,” Namakula said.

Trees were used for climbing and bearing fruit. Namakula laughed as she remembered how her mother used to steal fruit from the trees, which is a trait that Namakula also picked up.

“The fruit was so good! And we would climb the trees and try and get to the top. It was so fun!” Namakula said.

Schooling is also very different in Uganda compared to the US. And unfortunately, Namakula missed out on an eighth grade experience she had been looking forward to all her life, along with her classmates.

“My mom hired a friend to drive me and my siblings to school each day on a motor cycle because the school bus was not so good,” Namakula said. “We were put into four different colored groups by the teachers that distinguished our P.E. groups, but they ultimately became our ‘cliques.’ Red was for the athletic people, blue was for the ‘nerds,’ green (the one I was in) was for the nonathletic people, and I’m really not sure what yellow was. On the days we had gym,which was once a week, we had to come to school dressed in our color.”

“Everyone in my school looked forward to the eighth grade because once you entered, you would receive a fountain pen. How cool is that? Our very own fountain pens! I never was able to get mine because I left before, so I was very disappointed,” Namakula said.

Lucky for her, she didn’t have to wait long for her dream to come true.

“When I was in school, the nuns taught me to write in cursive using a fountain pen, which completely messed up my penmanship so that I can only write legibly using a fountain pen,” English teacher Michael Conroy said. “I had a bunch of fountain pens on my desk, and one day Charlote forgot a writing utensil and asked to borrow one.”

“I was so excited when he gave me a whole bunch of his fountain pens! I could not believe that I had finally got my fountain pens and how extremely nice Mr. Conroy was to give me them!” Namakula said.

“When I got a new shipment of pens, I decided to give Charlote some of my old ones. You would have thought I gave her the Crown Jewels. It’s charming that in an age of technology, she was so enamored of an old school writing implement,” Conroy said.

“I really love my pens and still cannot believe how nice Mr. Conroy was to give me his pens,” Namakula said.