The day we said his name out loud

Derrick was thirty when he passed.

He was the kind of person who quietly gave away his own clothes. He would show up at church with a bag, hand it to someone who needed it more, and never speak of it again. Sometimes he went with the church. Most times he went alone. He never asked to be thanked. He never asked to be noticed. He simply believed that if you had something in your hand and someone next to you had nothing, the maths of it was already obvious.

When he died, the house was full of people who had stories about him that we had never heard. A woman he had paid a bill for. A boy he had bought shoes for. A family he had checked on every month without telling anyone. Grief has a way of pulling the truth into the open. In those weeks after the funeral, we understood that we had lived beside a quiet giver for thirty years and only half known him.

The family made a decision. We were not going to let the giving die with him. We were going to keep his hand open in Ghana, legally and publicly, in his own name.

On 31 July 2022 we launched the Derrick Antwi Care Foundation. It was a small room. It was long speeches and short prayers and people who came from far to sit with us. There was no grand budget. There was no press release. There were only the people who had loved him and the people who had loved what he did.

What we raised that day was not a fortune. It was a beginning. It was enough to promise a village of children in Ghana that someone was coming. It was enough to book the trip. It was enough to say his name out loud in a country that had not yet learned it, and to mean it.

We walked out of that room understanding one thing very clearly. Every cedi that entered the foundation from that day forward was going to leave the foundation as a bill paid, a child fed, a hospital ward cleared. Nothing was going to sit in an account admiring itself.

That is the covenant we made on the thirty first of July.

Everything you see on this website is us keeping it.