Story of Hope - Topista and where TFCM began
2008 - 2018: 'From despair to a dream unfolding'
Topista is very special. She was just 6 years old when we first met her in the slums of Kampala, together with her mother Joyce and her two brothers, Jackson and Gerald...
Topista in February 2008
We found the family living in one room which was smaller than the average one car garage in the U.K. Joyce had been recently widowed at the age of 26, following her husband’s murder on his way home from an evening shift as a ‘Boda Boda’ (motor bike taxi) driver.
There is no mains water, electricity or sewage disposal in the numerous slum areas of the Ugandan capital city. This family’s room was virtually empty of household essentials and was dominated in one corner by a large pile of charcoal. This turned out to be the only source of a meagre income for the family, stored at home and sold locally whenever Joyce could compete successfully with the many other charcoal sellers. The pile of charcoal was covered with a sheet and it was on the pile that the family sat and slept.
One month after we first met her......ready to start at Happy Hours Primary, Kawempe.
Topista yearned to go to school and she became the very first child to be sponsored through TFCM.
Topista worked hard at her studies throughout primary school and in 2013 she successfully completed her primary leaving exams. We held a party in Uganda for her and six of her sponsored friends in February 2014, the week before they moved up together to secondary school.
In November 2017 Topista completed her first four years at secondary school and is awaiting the results of the Uganda Certificate of Education exams.
It has been such a privilege to support Topista and see her grow into a determined young lady with hopes and dreams for the future.
Thanks to her own determination to succeed, and with the support and encouragement of her sponsors, teachers and the TFCM team in Kawempe, she will be helped to make a decision on how her career will develop after the secondary school exam results are known.
From 2018, Topista will have choices to help shape her future!
That’s a far cry from the situation she, her mum Joyce and her brothers were in when we first met them nine years ago. They no longer live in the slums because Joyce, also, was given the opportunity to help herself and her family out of the cycle of poverty........