We have followed the Uganda Bloggers Community which is a shared initiative of bloggers in Uganda to improve the blogging and overall social media sphere in the country for a while now.  They aim to do this by equipping and training bloggers with necessary skills (technical, ethical and professional) as well as providing a platform for sharing of ideas and building community. The Community seeks to make blogging in Uganda and its diaspora richer, more organized and more appealing to readers home and abroad. We also aim to publish and promote Ugandan content on the web, effectually providing a citizen based portal for information about the politics, history, economy, fashion, entertainment and whatever else information there is about Uganda.

UgBloc also aims to do work ranging from advocacy, charity, outreach as a way of being part of the change we need to see.

Enjoy their journey presented in a story.

——————————————————————————————————————————————-In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. And that Word formed light and land flesh, and brought man and woman into being.

Out of the words of the mind, were the words of the mouth which produced tales and stories and lullabies. Of Horus and Anuket and Anubis and Khonsu along the streams of the River Nile. Of Moses and Rameses and seas that parted.

Of Kintu and Nambi and Gulu and Walumbe, gods or men by the Lake Nalubaale. And the Chwezi tall whose eyes with fire burned and ran like the wind. Of Giants in Greece, the sons of gods who tore lions apart.

And there was also hieroglyphics and cuneiform and the printing press and the words kept living and giving life. The words of print came alive.

And Bibles were written, and Encyclopaedia written, and letters from boys to impressionable girls, and constitutions and marriage certificates and agreements were signed in ink. And for a while print lived.

And then there was silicon. And the microchip and computer screens. And the blog was born from personal diaries. And the blog became the online diary, and then the journal, and then the treatise. And we shared our thoughts internal with all online till there was a need to bring the voices together.

We started as legends born from computer screens. Meeting monthly at corners of bars. Words have a way of being amorphous, not enough in the mind, online, so we met and we spoke. And for a while we met, wombing a new life online as we did offline. Writing stories of how our days went, of our failures, our successes, our gods, our business, our women, our men, our Amins and Muteesas. We started and then as life pressured us, we stopped.

Our words ran out. We stopped meeting at corners of bars. We stopped leaving thoughts online but that didn’t mean there were no others being born. Sharing our dreams, our desires our hopes. Forming lives on and offline.

And words brought us together. For words online connected worlds and countries and people from afar. Blogs needed to be found again. Bloggers needed to be encouraged again. We saw our brothers across borders growing and multiplying and fattening and glowing and we imagined if we could stick to the words we could also do it.

The Bloc began. To seek out. To encourage. To build. To form communities online and offline. To let our stories be told boldy and bravely.

And so we’re here, UgBloc.