At age 10, Peter Mutabazi ran away from home and began living in a pit of garbage and dead animals.
It was a step up.
In his inspirational book, Now I Am Known, Mutabazi tells the story of his abusive childhood and subsequent rise from a starving Ugandan street kid to international aid worker and then finally an advocate for foster children.
As a street kid, Mutabazi writes that he completely lost the sense of being human. "You trust no one … You have no empathy, no compassion, no faith, no kindness," he writes.
Always on the verge of starvation, he and his pals hustled food by carrying groceries for shoppers at a local market, stealing what food they could to survive and never sleeping. It was too dangerous to sleep.
Then, one day an extraordinary thing happened: A man asked him his name. This was unheard of since street kids were considered the equivalent of stray dogs. That single question opened Peter's heart. Over the next months, Peter became friendly with the man and his family. One day the man made him an offer he couldn't refuse: Food. The man would send him to a boarding school where they would feed him three meals a day. "To me that sounded better than going to heaven," he writes.
That was the beginning. In coming years, Mutabazi would awake to possibilities, and create dreams then achieve them. Mutabazi's impossible life journey, took him from Uganda to London, the United States, and 100 other countries. Today, an adoptive father, he fosters children in his home in North Carolina.
Now I Am Known by Peter Mutabazi with Mark Tabb; Baker Books, 224 pages.
