Rafiki, and the first hundred and thirty children

The proceeds from the launch sat in the account for one reason only. To leave it.

In 2023 we chose the Rafiki Satellite Village in Winneba as the first place the foundation would show up. Rafiki is a village that takes in children who have no one, and raises them into a real childhood. Real beds. Real school uniforms. Real Sundays. When we called ahead, they gave us a list. The list was not short.

We filled a van. Rice, cooking oil, sanitary pads, exercise books, pens, toothpaste, soap, clothes, footwear, and the things you only think of when someone reminds you that a child needs them. Nothing symbolic. Nothing photogenic for its own sake. Only what the house mothers had asked for by name.

When we drove in, the children were already at the gate. They had made a small song. They sang it before we had even opened the back of the van. It is one thing to know in your head that a hundred children live somewhere. It is another thing entirely to stand in a courtyard and count them with your eyes and understand that every single one of them is a whole person with a whole life happening whether the world is watching or not.

Between a hundred and a hundred and thirty children were touched by that first visit. Some of them are in the photographs on this page. Some of them are not. The ones who are not were shy, or busy, or eating, or simply had somewhere else to be. That is how it should be. This is not a photoshoot. This is a village where children live.

We left Rafiki that afternoon quieter than we came in. That is the part nobody warns you about. You expect to feel triumphant. You do not. You feel exposed. You feel like you have finally seen the size of the work, and the size of it is bigger than the van we came in.

But we also left knowing that the launch had done what a launch is supposed to do. It had turned a promise into a receipt. Somewhere in Winneba tonight, there are children sleeping under sheets that got to them because Derrick had lived, and had been the kind of man he was, and had been remembered honestly.

Rafiki was our first. It will not be our last.