Twesigye Jackson Kaguri’s story starts will the tiny village of Nyakagyezi in Uganda. Twesigye -- pronounced Tway-see-jay -- spends a solid five minutes at the beginning of our interview coaching me on how to pronounce his name. “Jackson is fine,” he finally says with a laugh. “Even my wife calls me Jackson.”
And that’s the thing about Jackson -- he makes you feel welcome instantly and his greatest desire is to help. The youngest of five children, he was raised in circumstances many of us only hear about on the news -- community-wide poverty, lack of access to fresh water and health care, prevalent domestic violence and a 20 mile walk to school.
Yet it was a walk he made every day based on values his parents instilled in him. “They really wanted us to get an education for two reasons. They wanted us to break the cycle of poverty and deprivation so we could be okay in the future. And they wanted us to graduate and come back and take care of them.” Jackson’s parents were barely able to afford the steep tuition and school fees, a common occurrence for many families in his village.
Despite the challenges, Jackson excelled in school and won a place at Makerere University in Kampala. It was there that he began learning about human rights as both a topic and a career. “Somebody came from the USA to teach us about human rights and while he is teaching about human rights … he lists out, ‘Every human being has a right to education.’ And my hand shoots up, and I go, “You mean every human being,” and he says yes, and I think, ‘there is definitely something wrong here.’”
That academic realization -- that his friends and family within his village were being denied a basic human right -- turned into a lifelong passion for Jackson. “Either people in my village are not human beings, or the people who wrote this are wrong.”
Jackson’s professor challenged him to go home and write about the injustices in his village -- of children who could not go to school because they couldn’t afford a pencil, or his mother who had to wake up and cook for his father after he beat her all night. “So all these injustices were all in my head and I didn’t know what to do with them or how to deal with it and now he had opened the world of human rights and injustices and I just poured it into the paper.”
Jackson’s professor sent his paper to Columbia University, and they offered him a position as a visiting scholar.
Opportunity and tragedy
Jackson arrived at Columbia University in New York City in a short-sleeved shirt and dress pants during a January snow storm, and so began his experience with American life.
During that exciting time, however, he learned his brother was at home dying of HIV/AIDS. Just a year after his brother passed away, Jackson’s sister also died of HIV/AIDS, both of them leaving behind children. “And there was my turning point.”
He instantly became a father of four as guardian of the children, one of whom also had HIV. When he returned to Uganda, he was overwhelmed with the villagers’ pleas for help from him. “Grandmothers who had also lost children to HIV/AIDS or war would bring their own little ones to come and ask me to help them with a pencil or pen for their little ones so they could stay in school -- so they could also realize that dream of an education so they could also have a good life in the future. And all it took was a pencil. And I thought instead of pencil and pens, we could build a whole school.”
Building a school for his village
Uganda has more than 2 million children orphaned as the result of HIV/AIDS. “You look at Michigan playing Michigan State University on a football Saturday afternoon. That Spartan Stadium is filled with 75,000 people -- adults. You can imagine those times five and they are all children and none of them have money or adults. It’s huge.”
And yet, Jackson worked diligently to do what he could. As he moved around the country, he established the
Nyaka Aids Orphan Project. He bought land in Uganda with his own money to build a school. He talked about the plight of his village to every person he met and with much help, the Nyaka AIDS Orphans School opened in 2003 with 56 students. All of the school’s students were “the poorest of the poor” who had been orphaned by AIDS.
“It would have been for me to just sit down easier to say, ‘We’ll give pencils to those we can. The problem is big. I’m not Bill Gates. I’m not Bono. I’m not Warren Buffet… But really somehow knowing that my education depended upon a fifth of a pencil it kept giving me hope. If my parents could get a pencil and cut it five times for each of my siblings, and here it was I have a degree from Makerere, I have a degree from Columbia, then I could make that happen for one child.”
Today, nearly 600 students occupy two schools where they receive two meals a day and health care. Nyaka Aids Orphan Project has also built community libraries, health clinics, farms, clean water distribution systems and homes for villagers. It operates programs to help grandmothers reach economic self-sufficiency to care for their grandchildren, many of whom are also orphans. The organization has hired staff overseas and now employs three staff in East Lansing to run the project.
Telling his story
“I didn’t have any books growing up until I was at University,” Jackson shares, and he didn’t want the children of Nyakagyezi to have the same experience, but many American books didn’t resonate with the children. To help, Jackson started writing his own stories for the children about his life in Uganda. He connected with a professor at Indiana University who wanted to help him publish his stories. Together, they wrote
“A School for My Village" and Penguin Group purchased the book to sell it nationally.
A home away from home
While Jackson pursued his work with Nyaka, he landed a position at Michigan State University in fund development and moved to Okemos. During a book tour at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, a woman approached him. “She greeted me in my mother tongue… and I’m like WOW!” The two married last year and recently welcomed a baby boy.
“We love the community and community activities all around.” Some of those activities include MSU games, playing and coaching soccer and running 5K races to benefit organizations like
Ele’s Place and the
MSU Safe Place. He is a past president of the East Lansing Rotary Club, furthering his mantra of giving back. Today, Jackson works full time as the Executive Director of the Nyaka Aids Orphan Project. He has been named a
Heifer International Hero, recognized in Time magazine’s
Power of One series and has spoken to the United Nations about his work.
“To make a difference in somebody’s life does not take the whole world and riches. And making a difference does not mean going all the way to my village like I did. Every person can make a difference.” And this man has certainly made a difference, not on just one child, but on thousands from East Lansing, Michigan to Nyakagyezi, Uganda.
Kate Tykocki is the interim news editor and a freelance writer for Capital Gains. She
geeks jazz hands, knitting and theatre. You can also follow her at
@katetykocki.
Dave Trumpie is the managing photographer for Capital Gains. He is a freelance photographer and owner of
Trumpie Photography.
Photos:
Jackson Kaguri
A Nyaka Nursery School Student with a comfort doll tied to her back
baskets, dolls and necklaces
Nyaka Primary School students singing
Nyaka Primary School Mural
Kaguri's book
Photos ©
Dave Trumpie