I’ve never slept in a Ugandan bed. From Lake Bunyonyi to Lake Victoria to Entebbe, there’s always been a friendly and juicy patch of grass for me to pitch my little fabric house. Shaped like a casket and loyal like one, my tent had been my go-to home throughout large parts of Africa, much more so than in Asia or Latin America. Sure, it had started to leak at some point and I could never figure out the where and how, but retiring it never crossed my mind, not even when sandwiched between puddles on either side of my sleeping pad. Until that one day a little boy happened. It was the grandson of the hostel owner in whose sunny and rainy garden I’d set up camp. When I came back that day, the damage was done. My then was in ruins. Somebody had seen the boy leaning on it, and the fiberglass poles had snapped like twigs. It took one little boy to demolish what the winds of the world couldn’t touch. His young grandfather was digging a hole in the garden when I approached him to get his take on the matter. He got defensive and loud to the point where I thought he would just put me in the hole, that perhaps he had shoveled it for that purpose, but when he realized that I simply wanted a solution, not gold, he lightened up enough to talk business. He took me to his blacksmith where we spent some two hours while the guy made replacement poles for me. From iron. They were rigid as iron and heavy as iron. My fiberglass poles had been light as blades of grass; now I was carrying an iron-clad, medieval torture device that weighed a few stones. The leak was worse now. But at least the new setup was in line, fashion-wise, with the potato bag that had replaced my tent’s original bag in the Philippines.