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Opening a new chapter after rubbing shoulders with death
•Rubanga's dream was to be one of the best female rally drivers in Uganda. But today she dreams of being an inspirational/motivational speaker and writer.
Betty Ogiel Rubanga is glowing with the joy of a new bride. She married the man of her dreams on August 10. She says marriage is the most wonderful thing. But under the veneer of blushing new bride, are the scars of a near death experience.
She speaks haltingly almost as if choked by emotion, but I realise it’s the effect of the accident she is telling me about. Besides the broken neck, paralysis on the right side from head to toe, and swollen left brain, the accident robbed her of speech. It also took away basic freedoms she would take for granted like, turning and twisting anyhow and the natural athletic swiftness which she was known for on and off the track.
The 33-year-old Human Resource officer in one of the leading oil companies had gone upcountry for a series of meetings when she decided to “swing by” a funeral rites ceremony in her home village Katakwi.
It turned out be a more engaging affair, and by Sunday morning, when she was to return to Kampala, she had barely slept. Despite her brother’s pleas that she rests and leaves for Kampala the next day, she set out in her car accompanied by her son, sister and two cousins. “It wasn’t long before I started wishing I actually listened to my brother.
I was feeling hot and disturbed. I caught myself dozing,” she says. The mother of one has no memory of the accident itself, but says eyewitnesses on the Mbale Tirinyi highway said the car rolled severally then hit a tree, throwing her son out of the windscreen in the process. “Thankfully he only had a broken bone and a few cuts,” she says. The other passengers were also injured, but Rubanga who had removed her seat belt just minutes to the accident bore the brunt of the impact with the multiple fractures and cuts.
“There was a time when people had written me off, immediately after the accident, there didn’t seem to be any hope of me ever living a normal life again, let alone recovering and marrying,” says Rubanga. But she did, and like her doctor predicted, it would, the swelling in her brain went down and she gradually begun regaining movement on her right side. She looks pensive when she looks back at her life after the accident and the arduous five year road to where she is now.
“I had to go for speech therapy at Mulago and relearn how to make sounds from scratch,” she says. She can now laugh at how her then six-year-old son would get frustrated with her because of her slow speech. “He would say ‘mummy speak properly! Mummy! why are you speaking like a baby all the time.’ It hurt me, but I knew he didn’t know better,” she says.
There’s nothing she misses more than her glory day on the track. Running and winning time and again. Betty, a natural born athlete keeps all the certificates and trophies she ever won. But she thinks athletics helped build tenacity in her, a trait she says has helped her throughout her recovery.
“I was used to running and finishing the race despite the hurdles, and that has helped me not to give up even when everything is so bleak. She has tried to get back to her much beloved sport and though her legs are now okay, her right arm hampers her motion, something she calls ‘really frustrating’. But that is not all, she gets terrible headaches when she attempts to run because the traumatised side of her brain can’t take all the pounding.
Despite all the hurdles and pain Rubanga sees her life as having taken a turn for the better since the accident. “I have drawn close to God and realised what is really important,” says the former workaholic who would even go to work on Sunday. While she still has a strong work ethic as a Human Resource officer, she now does everything in its required time and spends time with God and her loved ones.
She also feels lucky not to have damaged her spinal cord which the doctor said was just a miracle given the broken vertebrae; otherwise she would have been facing a life confined to a wheel chair. The dark skinned beauty smiles bashfully before giving me this last piece of information. She found the love of her life in the aftermath of the accident.
She was introduced to Julius Rubanga, the man who was to wipe her tears as she puts it, by a mutual friend at wedding in 2009 when she was just beginning to come out of the worst of the accident. She says, “I at first thought he was mocking me because of the way I talked. And didn’t let him get close.”
She laughingly recalls how she answered with a tart “in your dreams” at his asking when their own wedding will be. The injuries she sustained from the accident had dealt a blow on her self-esteem especially since she now walked with a stoop on one side of her body. It didn’t help matters when her then boyfriend left after what she suspects was fear of her paralysis.
“I was so far gone I even tried to discourage him by pointing out my physical imperfections, but he would hear none of it,” she says. Undeterred, Rubanga whom she calls the kindest most patient God-fearing man, silenced her by saying he sees her as Betty the full package and wasn’t bothered by her afflictions.
The Betty who confidently walks up a set of stairs in high heels is a far cry from the woman who returned to work in a neck brace and could barely construct full sentences. She jokes with her workmates a lot and teases a colleague about when she will be walking down the aisle. She makes me laugh hilariously at her narration of how she won a bell t-shirt at a race and got teased for months because people thought she won it at a drinking competition.
Except for stiffness in her neck, an extensive scar from the neck support system she initially had to wear, and how she constantly uses her left hand, it is hard to tell she was all but maimed by an accident.
She quotes the bible when I asked her what kept her going in those dark days when she was confined to a wheelchair mute- Proverbs 18:14 ‘The spirit of a man will sustain him in sickness, but a wounded spirit who can bear?’ “I had the will to live, for me and my son, I never gave up on that will even for a moment!” she says. She also went back to driving in 2008 and proudly lets me know she drives as many as 500kms with her one fully functioning arm.
