No more Joy

Andrew Ddembe recalls Joy’s large eyes driving male classmates crazy, Stephen Renny Galigitho cannot stop seeing her unpretentious mile-wide smile, while Dr Quinto Ebony appears lost for adjectives for a medical school college mate who gave his best ever birthday gift – food.

“Her large eyes… I teasingly called her ‘maaso glory’, drove many of my classmates crazy and she was the dream girl for many,” Andrew Ddembe, founder and chief executive of Mobiklinic, shared on Facebook as he explained why his profile picture has been of Joy since that sad Sunday.

“Anyways, her popularity never got to her head and she remained grounded and dignified, and never was there a whiff of scandal about her,” added Ddembe, who attended medical school with Joy.

Joy succumbed to complications related to a stroke on Sunday, September 24, two days after her 52nd birthday, from the UK where she had been living.

Two months earlier, she had been to Uganda for the last funeral rites of her mother. She developed high blood pressure and suffered a stroke soon after her return to the UK, and went into a coma until she was pronounced dead.

Missed message

Dr Quinto Ebony, the health systems management and monitoring and evaluation specialist at the Ministry of Health, has been tearing at his own conscience since September 24.

On June 19, Joy sent Ebony a message with a tinge of foreboding. She was coming around for her mother’s last funeral rites at their home in Busega.

“She gave me advance notice, as she did many of our friends because she wanted to make sure we attended, and in her own words, ‘there should be no reason to miss,’” he recalled as he paid tribute to his departed friend and colleague.

Dr Ebony had other engagements and missed what turned out to be the last chance he had to see and speak to Joy. In hindsight, he feels she was here to bid them farewell, and missing that has him in his own skin.

“Perhaps this pain I feel would be less if I had understood this coded message from God,” says Ebony.

“In the few days that followed, I was joining virtual prayers in the very Zoom Space Joy had welcomed me to less than a year before when we were eulogising and praying for her late mother.”

Like what hit Ebony, there was something preordained about Joy’s life – from her name to her character and all. She lived dispensing medicine to humanity in a manner that appeared like her life had been carefully stamped down in the scriptures.

A joyful heart is good medicine, says Proverbs 17:22. Some seeing this on her obituary poster must have thought it was just another scripture doled out for the departed.

But this was Dr Joy Kyazike Kyeyune and she was that scripture to the letter.

When Mr James William Mugeni, a Ugandan living in the US, was in 2020 reminded of former Makerere University Guild President Stephen Renny Galogitho, he appealed for the whereabouts of the banished medical student.

Galogitho had retreated into obscurity, beaten to his last pore by the injustice of the system he had tried to change. He was deep in the village but not too deep for Kyazike’s joy to waft.

“She told me, ‘Githo, the mighty Ivory Tower is in ashes. As the world rallied to rebuild it, you are the ‘short tower’ of Makerere University that was also destroyed and sacrificed at the altar of neoliberalism years ago. We are going to restore you,’” Galogitho recalled.

Joy assembled a group of doctors under a cause, “Together We Can Rebuild the Short Towe” and led the financial contributions and appeals that saw the former guild president hooked with a smartphone and a laptop to join the world he had given up on.

“In my second edition of life and therefore second liberation, Joy was among the people featured very prominently,” he says.

Galogitho said Joy had mentored his “doctor-daughter” into medicine.

“She had that unpretentious mile-wide smile that brought peace where there was none and was capable of even melting the icebergs of the South Pole,” he said of his 1991 classmate at the medical school.

While Joy founded and led Praiz Healthcare, a medical recruitment agency, in Wymondham, a market town in South Norfolk, England, she had her warmth spread far and wide – into her motherland.

While with her agency in England she helped supply doctors, nurses, and healthcare assistants including careers, support workers, and social workers, Dr Ebony said he had come across testimonies from workers in Kawempe Hospital where Joy kept new projects coming.

When Eng Emmanuel Mudali, an executive practitioner in the construction industry, insisted on a tribute for Joy, he did not have a peg for it but he told this writer that her life deserves more than just posthumous celebration.

Mudali is a lifelong friend of Galogitho so it was easy to see where he was coming from. But there was more to Joy than meets the eye. Not the eyes her classmates were in for, of course.

Joy had her heart and eyes in Uganda. She generously joined every medical cause she was made aware of and contributed to charities and cancer causes.

More recently, when medics raised their stethoscope in supplication as they asked for financial contributions to bail out Dr Anthony Buhangamaiso, who needed a kidney transplant, Joy was there.

So long, Joy

On a bright Saturday morning of September 26, 1971, Mr and Mrs John Baptist and Tereza Kyeyune of Mackay Road in Busega welcomed a baby girl at Mulago Hospital.

She was their first child and the staunch Catholic couple christened the baby Joy.

There was more joy to come for the couple – both departed – partly in name but otherwise Joy’s siblings. Jimmy Kyeyune, Joy-Stella Kyeyune who passed on early in life, and Joanita Kyeyune.

The patriarch died when the children were still young so Mother Tereza shouldered the burden. She weaned them on strong Christian values that kept the young Joy on the path she lived all her life.

Being raised by a single mother during difficult times reinforced noble qualities of goodness in little Joy who as firstborn was to be a guiding star and example to her followers.

With Catholicism defining their family, Joy attended Catholic Church-founded schools for most of her formative years. She was brilliant and topped most of her classes.

She attended Nakasero Kindergarten from 1975 to 1977, Kitante Primary School from 1978-1984, and Mt St Mary’s Namagunga for secondary education between 1985 and 1991.

She joined Makerere University for a degree in human medicine from 1991 to 1996 before attending the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the early 2000s.

In a way, medicine had chosen Joy for what she was. She exuded the warmth and compassion that the sick needed.

For many who knew her, Joy did not disappoint, from a medical officer at Mulago to NGOs in Uganda and the UK until she took on bigger assignments with the London Borough of Hillingdon and later Barnet NHS Primary Care Trust.

By then she had acquired a Master’s Degree from the prestigious London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Joy is survived by a husband, Mr John Kaggwa – the man who attracted her eyes while a student at Makerere – and a son, Moses.

Family and friends today congregate at Our Lady of Mt Carmel Busega Catholic Parish for a requiem mass in the morning before her body is taken to their ancestral home in Mityana District.

But for the Joy of her life, the family will hold an encore post-burial on Saturday at her marital ancestral home in Masaka where a requiem mass will be followed by tributes, music, and drinks – just the things that make joy.

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