While in Uganda, I repeatedly asked our host partner, Moses Owori, for the word ‘smile’ in Lusoga. ‘Sekako’, he told me. Over and over …

I’d hear it but spit something different out of my mouth: ‘Sikayo’ … ‘Sickaku’ … ‘Sykuku’. A simple three syllables but I mangled it every time.

I was hopeless. But the results were brilliant. My Ugandan subjects thought the way I butchered their language was hilarious. I’d get my nice smiles in the end.

No one found more hilarity with my speech impediment than Annet in the Kamuli produce market.

We came for her pumpkins. I wasn’t expecting to see the hugest smile in Uganda as well.

By the time we visited Annet I had gotten wiser. I wrote down ‘sekako’ in my phone and spelled it out phonetically … ‘say CAH koh’. So simple once I saw it written down.

I posed Annet with a pumpkin and asked her to smile. ‘Sekako,’ I shouted … or I thought I said it or some variant of it. Annet thought it was the funniest thing she had ever heard.

I reckoned I had mastered the word but Annet just ripped into a deep laughter every time I said it. I became frustrated because I wasn’t getting the pics I wanted. Her face was so contorted with the laughter and blurred from the movement in the low light of the market. ‘Annet,’ I said as I reviewed my phonetic spelling on my phone. ‘What’s wrong with the way I say it. I’m saying it perfectly.’ ‘Yes, yes, you are,’ she assured me. ‘It’s perfect. But it sounds SO funny when it comes out of your mouth.’

I decided to shut my mouth and in the end got the pics of Annet and her pumpkins and leafy amaranth that I came to get.

Every time I look at these pics of Annet I get a big ‘sekako’ on my face. We found Annet’s joy throughout Uganda where simple things, like a foreigner trying to speak the local language, can bring a smile to your face.