I can’t think of a better person to feature first. Esther and I met for this interview last year in May. But since the people I submitted it to didn’t use it, and Esther was gracious enough to let me publish it, here it is.
As the world celebrated Women’s Day last Saturday, many youth gathered at Bush Court in Kololo for a game of 5 Aside, a shorter, more fun kind of football. It was no coincidence that the majority were youth because the event organisers are young people in the group, 40 Days Over 40 Smiles.
An odd name if it is the first time you are hearing about the charity foundation. Or maybe you have heard more about the girl who started it two years ago. If you haven’t, this is the story of Esther Kalenzi and how she set out to be change she wanted to see and got several young people to join her along the way.
How the group got its name
In 2012, Esther was a Facebook addict. “I decided that I needed to do something useful with my time on Facebook but I didn’t know what so I let that go. As Ash Wednesday approached, I thought everyone gives during Christmas, how come no one ever does anything over Easter? It was one of those spontaneous things. I got the idea the night before on February 26 and on the 27th, I opened the page,” she recalls.
Esther named the page 40 Days Over 40 Smiles, complete with a smiley because the idea was to use the 40 days of lent to put a smile on the faces of over 40 children. She admits that she had no idea the amount of work it would need to pull this off and envisioned visiting all the major hospitals and children’s homes in town in one easy swoop –200 places to be exact was how big she saw this.
“As time went on I realised that wasn’t to be. For example, for a long time I was the only one posting and all people would do is like so I wondered if this was really going to happen.” she recalls. Esther paid no mind to this, taking joy in the number of likes instead. Even if she collected only Shs50,000, she was going to buy sweets and take them wherever. That was the other thing, she had no idea which places they were going to visit. She later settled on two children’s homes and people collected money and different items to take to them.
“When a workmate, who had a bakery near where I worked, heard about what I was doing, she told me to tell people to drop the things at her place. This became the central point. Every two days, I borrowed my mum’s car and carried the things home. Before I knew it, the garage at home was full and about two days to the visits I had Shs3.1m in cash.”
“The day came and there I was feeling like superman and therefore can do everything on my own. I hadn’t thought about the packing, dividing the things… so Thursday night I slept at about 4am,” Esther remembers, giving us a glimpse into the self-reliant person she describes herself as. Not that she doesn’t rely on anyone, she just tries to avoid being disappointed in people by trusting them to a degree.
She did rely on a friend to get a truck to carry the goodies they had collected to the homes, which he did. Esther also relied on the people who turned up on both days, about 35 on each day, to put smiles on the children they were going to meet. And they did.
The full impact of what she had started sank in when weeks later, when weeks later, the children were still on Esther’s mind as she started thinking about what they were eating, if they were eating. So she called everyone who had made the visits to a meeting. About seven people attended it and together, they set goals and how long they would take to achieve them.
“Before we knew it, I was getting calls like a child is sick, we have no school fees, there is no sugar. I had thought about doing this for the long term but I didn’t think I was going to be a full-time parent. I found myself spending about three days a week at the orphanage. There was no formula and I think that is what made it beautiful because if it had been organised, it would have taken the love out of it.”
“We realised that the most important thing we needed was to spend more time with the children and that is how the idea of breakfast with the children was born. It was good because the children got to eat things they had never eaten before and we had youth who would have ordinarily been nursing hangovers playing with the children. There were also one-on-one interactions with the children as they opened up to different members about different things, from body changes to esteem issues. It became more than just giving things,” Esther describes the breakfasts, adding that she believes this is what large organisations lack, especially those which give aid, a personal touch.
How far the foundation has come
Last year, 40 days over 40 smiles was registered as a company limited by guarantee, which is the level a company is at before it becomes a non-government organisation, something the foundation would like to grow into.
The foundation also boasts of an office on Sir Apollo Kaggwa Road in Makerere, lots of friends and networks. The latter showed themselves in hundreds at the 5 Aside event last Saturday. Esther is pretty sure the foundation’s first event attracted about 100 people only, therefore word is really getting around.
“It has taken a while but that just goes to show what patience and perseverance can bring. We are growing in number. We are growing in lessons. We have learnt so much from our past experiences. We have supported two homes so far and we expect them to increase.”
Besides the growth, the foundation is looking towards becoming more sustainable. Most of its funding has been through campaigns like asking people to contribute Shs5,000 a month or buy a brick by contributing Shs500 per brick.
“We try our best not to be dependent on organisations and in the past we have found that corporate organisations that we have tried to work with are not so keen on wholly supporting us. Since they are not fully on board, we are not going to let that stop us. We have decided to take matters into our own hands. We want change right now. We want to improve people’s lives right now. We want our society to be looked at differently right now. We want youth to actually participate in decision-making. We want to be in a position where we affect government policy, where government can think, ‘hm why are we putting the youth fund out there for anyone when there are people right here whose work we have seen’. Until then, we are making our own small change the best way we know how.”
Where she found her inspiration
What Esther calls a small change has spread so wide that it earned her the Hero’s award at last year’s Young Achievers’ awards. As she gave her speech, it was not the just the beautiful girl with a flower in her afro who had everyone enthralled. It was the conviction with which she spoke about the 40 Days Over 40 Smiles cause. It illustrated that what she thought she started on a whim, was just the fruit of a seed planted years ago.
“My parents are the kind of people who don’t close the door on anyone. Growing up, the house was always full of one relative or another so there was almost nothing like personal space. I think this made me a more compassionate person. I knew that my parents were not millionaires but they were willing to give,” Esther talks about what inspired her compassionate nature.
It is something that also came up in her younger days in school. In primary at Shimoni Demonstration School, she liked to make friends and listen to their stories. And as she listened, she always wondered what she could do, if the story she had was sad. In high school, at Nabisunsa and Aga Khan, she got involved by being part of the students’ council and finding out which students had no school fees and she would get a few friends to contribute, in the background of course.
“It has always been that I get more fulfilled when I do things for other people than when I do them for myself. I knew that one day, I would be doing something big. I wanted to make a difference and now I am excited that at least I have people who are following and saying we believe in the same dream,” the Uganda Christian University alumni says.
Hurdles
It has not been all smiles for Esther and her team however. “We have met some unscrupulous people who pretend to be needier than they are. We have been in a position where people have promised and they have left you hanging. On top of that there are moments when the people you thought you could rely on because they have been your allies disappoint you. You start to think ‘I must be the problem’ because I like to take responsibility for my mistakes. There are many moments when I have questioned what I’m doing but never moments when I have wanted to give up,” Esther describes problems they have had, without a hint of bitterness, stressing that despite these, she can’t walk away from it. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself.
What keeps her team going?
“At the top of our mind is to have something that will attract youth to have fun but also be reminded that we are doing something for a good cause. That is why we do accountability, why we invite people to take part in building a dormitory so that they feel a part of it, even years later.” When large numbers show up for these events, the team is not only overwhelmed, the numbers also give them faith in their cause.
Esther away from 40-40
When the conversation turns personal, Esther laughs and jokingly says she cannot deal, after being asked if she is in a relationship. When the laughter dies down, she finally says she is not, and leaves it at that, reminding us about the private person she says she is. Even her age remains a mystery when she says she has reached that point in her life when she will remain one age for about three years, cheekily alluding to the common practice of girls lying about their true ages.
One thing we do get out of her is that she can be high on life, as she excitedly talks about her love for music and dancing. These are two things she enjoys so much that whenever she is out with friends who know the more private, laidback Esther, think she has had something to drink till they remember that she is a teetotaler.
We also know that she is always well put together. Her recent updates on social media might portray a sleep-deprived girl but in person, she is lively, and her skin glows eternal restfulness. And her style is not half-bad –young professional when need be and smart casual when it calls for it.
Esther might have started out with a 40-40 plan but it has spanned more than 40 days and made more than 40 people smile, including the people who have had the honour of sharing in her dream, and the many more who will.