A Little Story

At various intervals, people ask me how I got involved into HOCT, how it all started, what happened, how am I doing this, why…
It is a very beautiful story – perhaps the most beautiful of my life.

For me, HOCT started in 2019; once upon a time, while scrolling on Facebook, I stumbled upon a post by Mugoya Swaliki who was asking people to write letters to the children in his care, so that they’d develop their English skills. I wrote letters to a few of them and learnt a little bit about the mission he had imagined – helping the poor children in his village.

One day, I received a photo of Mpakibi Madina, holding the letter from me to her chest. The letter was in an A6 envelope, and her little waist was… the size of that envelope.

It broke my heart.

You how how sometimes you stumble across photos that are absolutely horror, of children on the verge of death because of starvation – and birds of prey circling them in the hopes that they’d die soon?

That day I told to myself: I am going to change this photo. Those photos. Any horror photo I receive, I will make it better.

Thus began HOCT, with Mugoya and myself as navigators through an ocean of mistrust and poverty. And then slowly-slowlyy, because of my good friends, good reputation, because of a few good people that trusted me and started helping a child, because of Mugoya’s good an impeccable work, HOCT began to grow.

At the beginning (in 2019), HOCT had 19 children. Today, in 2024, we have 600+ and we keep growing. We built a library, a hospital, we are about to finalize the construction of our school. We never take days off; wherever we go, HOCT comes along.

Each day, ech of those 600 children has food to eat and a good shelter. To the best of our abilities, we nurture their health, we get them life-necessities, such as clothes, basins, pots, charcoal; some of the children attend school.

HOCT is a good place. It is registered legally in both our countries, we pay the necessary taxes, the workers receive fair pay and nobody is exploited. We remove children from labor and we buy them football t-shirts so that they can play and be happy.

For all that matters, we feel we do not live in vain.

In the photo: Mpakibi with the letter from me.
She has now grown, she is healthy, I fixed her house; sometimes, she smiles.