Shadia and Imran Nakueira rented the space for a restaurant in the dreamy, lakeside town of Jinja, Uganda, before they knew exactly what they were going to do with it.
They knew one thing though: They wanted to work alongside people with disabilities.
This resolve had a lot to do with their first meeting. The couple, now married for three years, met at a sporting event at a primary school for children with learning disabilities in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, in July 2013.
Why We Wrote This
Sikia Cafe is more than a place to get dessert, or a job. It’s building community and breaking down barriers as it challenges people’s ideas about language and disability.
Imran had driven his sister to the event. Shadia, who had just finished her MBA in the United States, was dishing up ice cream for students and guests.
“She was busy that day and she was selling to many people,” Imran says, with Shadia leaning against him. There was no time for flirting, so he had to get creative. “The story [we told her] was ‘We have a party somewhere. Can you supply ice cream? Can we have your number?’”
Four years later, Shadia closed up her ice cream business in Kampala to join her new husband in Jinja, where he worked in human resources for a forestry
Shortly after the couple acquired the space, in 2018, an idea came along at the market.
“There was this very nice gentleman who I started buying things from. He used to sell lemons and he was deaf,” she says. But she noticed other people mostly avoided him – never knowing, for example, how good he was with money. Was there a way, she wondered, to highlight other deaf people’s skills, and break down those barriers?
That was the birth of Sikia Cafe, staffed by deaf waiters, which opened last August – ice cream section first. The name is derived from Swahili, and means “hear” or “listen.”
Listening happens in so many ways beyond sound, Shadia says: body language, emotion, watching.
