By Isaac Christopher Lubogo
When I first entered the gates of Makerere University, the world appeared like an uncut diamond—shining yet waiting to be shaped. We were young, restless, and searching. Searching for meaning. Searching for God. Searching, too, if we are honest, for those angels who walked in skirts and carried the perfume of possibility.
Among those angels, one name lived on every tongue, whispered like scripture. Debby Kats.
She was the super girl of our time. The one whose beauty did not beg to be noticed; it demanded it. She was chocolate-skinned, radiant, with that rare mixture of serenity and fire. She didn’t just sing worship songs; she inhabited them. When she lifted her voice under our mango tree revivals, even heaven must have paused to listen. We, the balokole, young born-agains, would sway under the night sky, our hands lifted, our eyes closed, yet half of us praying to God and the other half secretly praying that Debby would just notice us.
They said she came from Namagunga. Others swore she was a Gayaza girl. To us, it didn’t matter. All we knew was that she came from those citadels of excellence where Uganda groomed her queens—brains polished like ivory, beauty sculpted like art.
One evening after revival, I dared the impossible. My heart beat like the drums of Busoga during Kyabazinga coronations. I walked toward her.
“Praise God,” I said, my voice half prayer, half tremor.
“Praise God,” she answered, and her smile was enough to baptize a sinner without water.
Then I offered her what we called a Christian hug—the carefully measured embrace where shoulders barely touched, but from the waist downward, one kept a holy distance, as though Moses himself had marked a burning bush between us. She obliged, soft and gracious, and for that one sacred moment, I touched the robe of an angel.
But then, I did what was either boldness or madness. I stretched my palm into hers. I wanted to feel, just for a moment, the hand of perfection. I expected the velvet of roses, the softness of petals. Instead—my heart nearly stopped.
Her hands were hard. Calloused. Seasoned. The palms of one who had known toil.
I recoiled inwardly. How could this be? How could the paragon of beauty, the goddess of Gayaza, the queen of Namagunga, the dream of Makerere, carry in her palms the scars of work?
Later that night, as Tim and I walked back to Mitchell Hall, the question burst out of me.
“Tim, why did her hands feel… hard?”
Tim laughed, the kind of laugh that carried wisdom. He said:
“Brother Isaac, those hands are not a flaw. They are the proof. They tell you she is no slay queen. She is no idle ornament. She is hard work wrapped in beauty. Those hands are destiny itself.”
And suddenly, my eyes opened.
The comparison struck me like lightning. I thought of the other girls—the ones with palms as soft as cream, manicured, painted with figure polish, glittering under campus lights. Their hands did not know work. They only knew selfies, mirrors, and waiting for services. They were beautiful ornaments, yes, but ornaments consume; they do not build. Their softness was not innocence—it was idleness wearing perfume.
Debby was different. Her rough hands told the story of scrubbing pots at dawn, of fetching water, of weeding gardens under the scorching sun, of training at home where discipline was law and laziness was exile. Her beauty was not for display alone—it was forged in the furnace of labor.
Thirty years passed. Time, the great revealer, wrote the conclusion. When I saw Debby again, she was no longer a girl but a woman accomplished, sitting behind the wheel of one of Uganda’s latest cars, grace and success dripping from her like anointing oil.
And then it dawned on me like prophecy fulfilled: those hardened palms had written her story. Beauty, when clothed in hard work, becomes destiny. Beauty, without labor, becomes memory.
Many of the soft-handed ornaments of our youth? They faded. Their softness betrayed them. Time robbed them, for beauty without scars is a flower without roots—it withers at the first drought.
But Debby? She remained. Her calloused palms had built a fortress, her scars had become her crown.
And I learned this gospel:
Soft hands may dazzle, but hard hands deliver.
Beauty without work is decoration; beauty with work is destiny.
It is not the smoothness of the skin that builds empires, but the scars of diligence.
Debby Kats was not just beautiful. She was a psalm. She was Proverbs 31 incarnate: “She works with eager hands… she is clothed with strength and dignity.”
Her life thundered the lesson that heaven wanted me to learn under that mango tree: the true measure of a person is not in the perfection of their surface, but in the scars their hands carry.
Debby’s hands preached to me louder than her songs. And to this day, I remember them as the gospel according to toil—the gospel that beauty without labor is vanity, but beauty married to hard work is eternal glory.