Uganda charity founder hopes no family must choose between saving one child from cancer or letting the other starve

Every year, 400,000 children worldwide get cancer. Half are never diagnosed, and 4 in 5 won’t survive due to the lack of access to quality care. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital believes children all over the world deserve the same chance at survival and is working with doctors and foundations across the globe to make that dream a reality. For every child, everywhere. 

Here’s the story of one of the many global foundations St. Jude partners with to help more children live.

For a man dedicated to easing the suffering of children with cancer, Brian Walusimbi introduces himself in a most peculiar way.

“I am a clown,” he says. “Yes, the first clown in Uganda.”

It’s an icebreaker, for certain. But it also marks the start of this computer science graduate’s unlikely journey to pediatric cancer advocate and, ultimately, his charity’s partnership with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital — a global unifier in the fight against childhood cancer.

In 2007, when the Uganda Cancer Institute invited Walusimbi to host a charity party for children, he said no. He’d never known anyone with cancer. But the hospital director was determined. He asked Walusimbi to just come have a look.

“I walked through those doors and it was a tiny little space with kids, adults, men and women all tucked up in a little, tiny space,” he remembered. “And the room was so small that the kids were on the floor. So, you would almost walk over the different patients that were on the ground. And outside, the verandas were so packed with mattresses, cooking equipment, because people had come from the villages and didn’t have anywhere to stay. So, they were sleeping outside on the verandas.

“And when I saw that — I saw kids with tumors coming out of their eyes, mouths and everywhere. And I thought: I want to do something about it.”

So, Walusimbi invited friends to help host a ‘Smile Again’ party, where children could shift their focus from pain and injections to face painting, puppet shows and, of course, clowns. By the end of the party, so many of Walusimbi’s friends had donated they were able to pay for the full treatment of 10 children.

“I thought I could do this everywhere I went,” Walusimbi said. “… And every home I would go to, I would tell them about what I was doing at the hospital. And we managed to raise quite a lot of money for the kids to receive their treatment.”

In 2008, he founded Bless a Child Foundation.

Along the journey, Walusimbi realized the chemotherapy the donations paid for wasn’t curing children. They were so malnourished their little bodies couldn’t handle the treatment. Other families would come back for only two cycles of chemotherapy even though Bless a Child had paid for 10 because they had no transportation to and from the villages. And the ones sleeping on crowded verandas were dying because they contracted malaria and other diseases not related to cancer.

“And that’s when I thought: What if I could find a home near the hospital where the kids could find a bed, a warm meal and just a place that’s not a hospital setting?” Walusimbi recalled.

Being in a crowded house with children in need was already a familiar scenario for Walusimbi. Growing up, his grandmother took in children living on the street.

“We would have one mattress laid straight,” he said. “And the only part that you could put on the mattress was your head. So, the rest of it would always be on the ground. In our house, we always had about 30 to 40 kids that she would just pick up and raise and provide meals and accommodation.

“And that’s what I wanted to do when I opened the very first home.”

In March 2010, Bless a Child Foundation opened its first support home, in Kampala, Uganda’s capital city, where children suffering from cancer and their families are provided meals, accommodations, psychosocial support and play therapy. Since then, Bless a Child has supported more than 6,000 children and now has four support homes across Uganda.

Still, the foundation can only support about 60 percent of the pediatric cancer patients that hospitals treat in Uganda. And while pediatric cancer data is limited, estimates from the Uganda Cancer Institute show that 75 percent of children with cancer are still either undiagnosed or misdiagnosed and only approximately 50 percent of children treated for cancer in Uganda survive.

Most people don’t know what cancer is because there’s little awareness in the country.

“So, you find that most of the parents move so many times from one witch doctor to a herbal healer to a charge-for-prayers — all these different journeys to try and find a solution,” he said.

And when they finally reach the village hospitals, there’s no equipment to diagnose cancer.

“So, we hear stories of families that have been on this journey for three to four years without ever even making it to the main cancer hospital. And by the time they make it to the hospital, it’s already too late.”

For the ones who are diagnosed, cost is an incomprehensible burden.

“Some of them, it costs them their whole savings,” Walusimbi said. “… That means the whole harvest.

They have to sell all they have to make one trip to the hospital.

“And this is a question a lot of parents have asked us: ‘Do we save one and leave the others to starve and not go to school? Or do we let this one go, so we can use the food to keep our family alive?’” he said.

Bless a Child Foundation helps alleviate that heartbreaking worry.

In 2021, the charity became a St. Jude global partner to find expertise and guidance on how to raise money to address some of these issues. And in 2022, Walusimbi visited the St. Jude campus in Memphis for training along with other foundation members from across the world. 

The visit inspired him, he said. 

“The cancer journey, it gets lonely,” he said. “It definitely gets lonely. And a lot of times you feel like — especially where we are — you feel like you’re alone. You’re fighting, shooting in the dark. The doctors, as the medical team, they have their thing they’re doing. And it comes to us who are almost isolated, working on our own. But to come in a place like this where you see so many people with equal passion or even way more passion than you, people that are doing unbelievable things all over the world. … And some of it have been at it for way longer.

“They have seen it all. They have experienced it all. They haven’t had money, and they still made it. So, almost everything that I’m going through, there’s somebody who has been through it.”

He often thinks of the children who didn’t survive but continues his work in the hope that more will.

“One time, we had a child that was passing away,” Walusimbi remembered. “And he had lost his sight. And he asked his mother: ‘I want to be at Akiba.’ Akiba is one of our homes. ‘Mom, take me to Akiba.’

“And the mom told him: ‘You are at Akiba.’ And he asked: ‘Can you call my friends?’ This was in the middle of the night, so we had to wake up all the friends, all his age mates. They came near his bed. And when he heard that they were there, that’s when he passed on.

“So, it’s more than just a place where you come while you’re going through treatment. It’s a place where you find family, where you find love, where you find hope.”

For more information about Bless a Child Foundation, visit https://blessachildfoundation.org/