There was a strange six-week window right before Gevity became very real. We had spent months on the business plan, the design, the finances, the vendors, and all the decisions that come before you actually start building something, but we were still in that awkward stage where almost everything was in motion and very little was physically happening. Design documents were being finalized, vendors were waiting for green lights, and we knew that once construction really started, disappearing for a few weeks would become significantly harder.
So Espoir and I did what any responsible founders about to start an 18,000-square-foot build would do. We left the country and ended up volunteering in Uganda.
We went to Australia first to spend time with her family. Her sisters live there, her mom spends a lot of time there, and it gave us a chance to be with everyone before heading back toward the U.S. Somewhere in the process of figuring out the return trip, I started looking at the map and thinking about Africa.
Africa has always been my favorite continent to travel through. I had spent a good chunk of 2019 in East Africa, including several weeks volunteering in Malawi, and something about that part of the world had stayed with me. The landscapes are huge, the culture feels alive, people live much more publicly, and there is a warmth to everyday interactions that I have rarely found elsewhere. It can be chaotic and frustrating and beautiful all at once, which is usually a good sign that a place is going to stick with me.
Espoir had never been to Africa, so I told her we were going.
I also knew I did not want to just fly into a capital, take a few photos, and move on. My favorite trips usually have something attached to them beyond sightseeing: a mountain, a trek, volunteering, staying somewhere long enough to have a fruit guy. Something that gives a place time to become more than a backdrop.
My experience in Malawi had shaped how I thought about that. I had worked with a small local development organization outside Blantyre and raised money from friends and family. Because it was small and local, I could actually see where the money went. We bought livestock, helped with a sustainable farming project, and watched the resources become something useful in front of us.
That made me skeptical of large philanthropy organizations where the money disappears into a massive system and you never really know how much of it reaches the people you intended to support. I am not saying large organizations cannot do good work. I just prefer being able to point at the thing.
So when we decided on Uganda, I started looking for something small and local and eventually found Worth a Haven Foundation through Workaway. That connected us with Masika and her husband, Desire, in Kasese, a town in western Uganda near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Getting there was our first introduction to the country.
We started in Kampala and boarded a bus heading west. I am not sure I can adequately explain that ride except to say that the driver had tremendous confidence in both the bus and his own mortality. We tore through towns, passed vehicles I would not personally have passed, stopped unpredictably, and operated under what felt like a very loose interpretation of bathroom breaks. At various points, I would look over at Espoir and think that I had perhaps oversold the romance of Africa.
Eventually Kampala disappeared behind us, the roads opened up, and the landscape became greener. The Rwenzori Mountains started appearing in the distance, and after hours of dust, traffic, questionable driving decisions, and a rapidly growing appreciation for stationary objects, we finally reached Kasese.
The first thing I remember is how welcoming people were. Not in a polished hospitality sense, and not because anyone was being paid to make us feel comfortable. People simply talked to us. You would walk down the street and someone would wave. Somebody else would come over to shake your hand. Kids would yell hello from across the road. Someone would ask where you were from, tell you welcome to Uganda, and then continue on with their day.
After a few days, Espoir and I started joking that walking around Kasese felt like being the popular kids at school. It seemed impossible to go anywhere without someone saying hello. Because we stayed for a few weeks, those interactions slowly became less random. We found our regular places. We had a fruit vendor at the market we kept going back to. People started recognizing us. The mental map you build when traveling started filling itself in.
That is one of my favorite parts of slower travel. At some point, a place stops feeling like somewhere you are visiting and starts feeling, very temporarily, like somewhere you live.
We stayed with Masika and Desire in their home. There was a room upstairs with bunk beds, so Espoir took the bottom and I took the top. It was a glamorous setup for two people who were simultaneously trying to build a business back in Austin, but it worked. At night, mosquitoes became part of the routine. During the day, there were always people moving through the house, kids around, food being prepared, conversations happening, and some small problem that needed attention.
Masika was a force. One evening, she sat with us and started scrolling through old photos and videos on her phone, showing us how Worth a Haven had started. She told us about children arriving from around the Congo border after losing family and stability to conflict. What began with helping a few children grew over time into a home, then a school, then an entire ecosystem built around feeding kids, getting them medical care, educating them, and giving them somewhere safe to sleep.
There was no dramatic moment where she decided to build an orphanage. Life just kept putting another child in front of her, and she kept saying yes.
That was the part that stayed with me.
I remember sitting there listening to her explain everything and thinking about how casually we use the word founder. Back in Austin, I was building a company. Masika had spent more than a decade building a place for children who had nowhere else to go. It gives the word a different weight.
The kids themselves made it impossible to stay on the outside of the experience for very long. There was no cautious warming-up period. Within minutes, someone was holding your hand, someone else was asking questions, kids were running through the dirt, laughing, climbing on things, and pulling us toward whatever game had just been invented.
Some of the conditions were hard to see. Clothes were worn. Food security was a real issue. Rice was not something to take for granted. We saw fruit that had been bitten into by rats because proper food storage itself was a challenge.
I want to be careful with that part of the story because there is a lazy version of travel writing where someone visits a poorer community, sees people smiling, and comes home announcing that possessions do not matter. That is not what Uganda taught me. Food matters. Safe housing matters. Sanitation matters. Education matters. Medicine matters. Money matters quite a lot when you need any of those things.
What surprised me was realizing that those things, while essential, were still not the whole picture.
The kids laughed constantly. They danced, sang, played with whatever happened to be around, and looked after one another. When we asked what they wanted to become, the answers came quickly: doctors, pilots, lawyers, teachers. There was no hesitation and no attempt to make the dream more realistic for the room.
That stuck with me because ambition had somehow survived their circumstances. It had not been negotiated down yet.
Once we understood more about what Masika and Desire were trying to build, Espoir and I decided to raise money. We had enough reach through social media and our own networks that we figured we could at least put it to use, and by the end we had raised close to $5,000.
The thing that made that money feel different from almost any donation I had made before was that we watched it turn into something. Bricks arrived on trucks. Building materials showed up. People from the local community were hired and paid to work. Food was purchased. Improvements started happening to the places where the kids were sleeping.
The money stopped being a number on a screen and became something physical.
We helped carry sand, move materials, dig toilets, and do whatever other jobs somebody trusted us not to screw up. There was something satisfying about work that simple. Something needed to be moved, so you moved it. Something needed to be dug, so you dug it. Nobody needed a strategy deck explaining why.
I remember standing there covered in dust, watching local workers build with materials partly funded by people donating from thousands of miles away, and thinking that this was the clearest example I had ever seen of money becoming something human. You could point at it. That truck. Those bricks. That food. That day’s wage. A better place for a kid to sleep.
The days were not all work. Once a week, we would buy chicken because meat was not something everyone was eating all the time, and chicken night became a little event. We would eat together, the kids would be around, people would talk, and the whole thing had a communal feeling that made a very simple meal feel important.
The markets became part of our routine too. Uganda has incredible fresh fruit, and we found a vendor we kept going back to. We would walk through town, buy what we needed, stop to talk to people, and inevitably get interrupted half a dozen times by someone saying hello.
Those are the memories that come back to me most now. The fruit vendor, the bunk beds, the mosquitoes, chicken night, carrying sand, kids turning almost anything into a game, and people waving at us from across the street. It was ordinary life, just not ours.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I started thinking differently about the word rich.
Before Uganda, I probably would have defined wealth mostly through access: enough money that you do not have to worry all the time, a comfortable home, good food, healthcare, freedom to travel, and the ability to make choices. I still think all of those things matter. Uganda did not convince me to trade my refrigerator for spiritual enlightenment. I remain very pro-refrigerator.
What it did was make the definition feel incomplete.
In Kasese, people knew each other. They greeted each other. Kids were surrounded by people who noticed them. Meals were shared. Life happened out in the open. If somebody disappeared, I suspect someone would notice fairly quickly.
That kind of wealth is hard to measure.
Back home, we have become remarkably good at removing the need for other human beings from daily life. You can order dinner without speaking to anyone, work all day without leaving your apartment, exercise alone with headphones in, and have almost anything delivered to your door. The convenience is incredible. It can also be lonely as hell.
Kasese was not some idyllic answer to modern Western life, and life there could be difficult in ways I would never minimize. But it reminded me that community is not a luxury you add once everything else has been taken care of. It is part of what makes everything else worth having.
I think about the timing of that trip a lot now because almost immediately after we returned to Austin, our six-week window closed. Construction started moving. Vendors needed answers. Budgets changed. Problems appeared from places we did not know problems could appear from. We started hiring. Memberships began coming in. Suddenly every day contained forty decisions that apparently only Espoir or I could make.
Gevity had begun.
I would be lying if I claimed Uganda somehow inspired the whole thing. Gevity was already well underway. But Kasese reinforced something underneath it. People need places where they are known, where meals get shared, where they can work beside someone, struggle beside someone, laugh with someone, and occasionally have somebody notice that they have not been around lately.
That need does not disappear when you become successful. If anything, success can make it surprisingly easy to insulate yourself from it.
When we eventually left Kasese, I did not feel like we had changed the world. We had spent a few weeks there, raised around $5,000, carried some things, dug some holes, bought some food, and hopefully made a small corner of life a little easier for people we had come to care about.
That was enough.
I think we sometimes let the scale of problems convince us that small actions are pointless. If you cannot solve poverty, what difference does one building make? If you cannot help every child, what difference does helping twenty make?
Quite a lot if you are one of the twenty.
Masika understood that better than I did. She never solved everything. She just kept responding to whoever was standing in front of her.
I left Uganda with a slightly expanded definition of wealth. Money still belongs in it, along with safety, education, healthcare, opportunity, and all the things that allow people to build better lives. But there is another kind too: being known, having someone expecting you at dinner, having people who notice when you disappear, and having a community willing to carry some of the weight when life gets heavy.
Uganda has real poverty, and pretending otherwise would insult the people living it. But Kasese also had forms of abundance I rarely see measured. For a few weeks there, sleeping on the top bunk under a mosquito net, eating chicken with a house full of kids, waving back at half the town, and watching five thousand dollars turn into bricks, food, wages, and shelter, I felt pretty damn rich.
