University Stories: Hope Adiru

Adiru Hope’s life is organized around helping, serving, and loving children. Her life is a ministry to the children of Uganda – children who are just like she was at one point in her life. 

Polygamy is legal and normal in Uganda. When Hope was young, she lived at home with her mom and nine siblings. Her dad split time between his two families, fifteen children in all. Her dad wanted to see all of his children attend school. Even though he worked for the Post Office, he could not afford to pay tuition and fees for all fifteen children. He wrote letters to the school and sent them with his children. He would request extensions and depend on the grace of the teachers to allow his kids to go to school. This plan worked for some time, but in 2002 at nine years old, Hope, along with several siblings, was sitting at home, unable to attend school because the fees had not been paid. A Hope Alive! mentor named Christine took an interest in them and brought Aunt Catharine Coon to meet the family. To the family’s joy, Hope and three of her brothers were enrolled in Hope Alive!.

Hope says, “I can still see her (Aunt Catharine) sitting in our sitting room having a discussion with my mom when she let us know that we were now enrolled at Hope Alive!. I went to a new school, got a new uniform, new shoes…. It was as if life was beginning again!” 

At nine years old, Hope came to her first Hope Alive! Saturday Club at Lugogo Baptist Church and walked into the doors of a church for the first time in her life. She soon accepted Christ her Lord and Savior, began being mentored and eventually became a student leader at Hope Alive!. Hope graduated high school and became the first person in her family to go to university. 

While at university, Hope completed an internship with an organization that works with children who live on the streets of Uganda. Now a university graduate, Hope, through her work as a resettlement officer, has the tremendous joy of rescuing, rehabilitating, and re-homing Ugandan street children. Hope says, “We find these very young children on the streets, we pray for them, love them, rehabilitate them and then find a loving home for them. It’s truly transformational work. Every time I see a street child make it in life, it gives me the greatest joy!” 

Hope knows that going to university opened her mind to the challenges of the world and gave her an opportunity to be part of the solution. “Through Hope Alive! and through university, I learned that I, too, can change the life of a child.” 

Hope works as a resettlement officer, serves as a mentor at Hope Alive! and is the children’s ministry leader at Lugogo Baptist Church, the church she began attending as a nine year old. Her life has changed, and because of her life, many, many other Ugandan lives are being changed. Hope is not just her name, it is the very essence that she embodies for so many Ugandan children.  

Hope says, “I am a testimony of a child whose life was changed. In an actual sense, you are changing one life but, in reality, you are creating a pathway for many lives to be changed.”

Thank you, Hope, for walking down that pathway. You do it so very well.