The love letter could save the day

It is back to school for third term and one thing teachers should take seriously this time is the teaching of how to write love letters. It would help them too. In fact, if James Tweheyo, the secretary general of the Uganda National Teachers Union (Unatu) had written a clever letter to president Museveni professing the teachers' love and absolute support for the big man in 2016, the 20 percent salary increment for teachers would have long been effected and the strike prevented.

I first learned of the power of words to feed and take you places back in the day when a rich kid I went to school with paid me to help write a love letter to his girlfriend. I soon started spending a bulk of my free time leafing through the library dictionary and listening to song lyrics because the more words I learnt to use impressively, the more mandazi money I made from not just those who wanted to mesmerise their high school sweethearts, but even those who wanted to show their parents back home that their time at school was turning them into wordsmiths!

This was before social media hit the scene and popularised the condensation of grammer which has in turn murdered the way the English language is used. It was way before schools had labs filled to capacity with computers connected to the internet. Even mobile phones (then the size of bricks) were the preserve of the very rich. Thus communication was mostly through hand-written letters.

That is how it came to be that the coolest kids in any school were not the nimble dancers or the comics. These were popular but not as widely as the literature students who carried heavy volumes of classical novels. They knew their words and it showed during school debates and seminars.

In the single-sex school I attended where our preoccupation was writing love letters to the girls’ school in the neighbourhood, we were consultants! Of course the letters we wrote were mostly silly but the effort we put in enriched our vocabulary and gave us loads of fun as well. That fun can revive your hurting relationship too if you stop what you are doing now and pick pen and paper. That letter could put a smile on your spouse’s face and bring the spark back into your marriage.

Today's urban youths who are losing the authentic use of language through social media and SMS will become born-again through letter writing and their teachers will get their pay rise too! In short, everyone benefits.