Flavia Tumusiime continues to share inspiring stories from her life and career in the “30 days of Flavia Tumusiime” series. On day 23, she posted:
“The other day, I told you about destiny and now I would like to share another story of how destiny manifests in our lives.
Today I want to tell you about a man who helped me so much at the start of my career. I was in the last year of Teens Club, and I wanted to join radio, the late Banji of Sanyu Fm suggested I go meet with Ben Mwiine who was the head of programming at Sanyu FM. He brushed me off as a teen coming in to look for a job and didn’t take more than 5 mins in that meeting, but he asked me to do a demo and maybe bring it to him.
I didn’t know where to start and I asked around for advice on how to compile a demo and no one helped me. Then a cousin told me that the famous Roger Mugisha had set up an audio studio and she overheard that he was looking for voice talent.
I took a chance and went to the studio, 3 hours of waiting and he finally saw me, he looked at this kid and wasn’t sure, but he let me go into the studio booth and read a script and boom! his face lit up and he said “wow, you don’t look like your voice” I ended up doing more than one script and he paid me for each script full price even though I was a new voice.
I had a chat with him and told him about my radio dreams, he simply told me to be patient and with time it will happen. He continued to recommend my voice to other producers and I got some good work.
For about a year, I was living off voice overs and he always spared time to teach me on how to better myself and my voice and the day I joined Capital FM, I came to him and was so excited to share the news.
He was happy for me but he had a conversation with me and told me that the platform I had now, would be so big and I was going to do great, but I need to be careful because the industry wont be easy and I need to watch out and take care of myself, he also told me that now, we were going to be peers. I thought he was crazy, because I never imagined I would ever get to work with people I looked up to like him, but my destiny was being revealed through him.
I appreciate that to this day, he has never once asked for my gratitude. We now work together as peers in the industry but he continues to respect me and is so humble you would not even know what he did for my career. Today is a day of gratitude for me.”
BigEyeUg Staff