When Love Brings Laughter Back

When the Hope Alive! team in Kyabakuza first met Asiyo Nandi, she was a 10-year-old girl who had learned to live in the shadows. Her father abandoned the family five years prior, and with her mother gone to work each day, Nandi spent her hours alone at home. She was quiet, withdrawn, and hesitant to trust. When the staff took her enrollment photo (pictured below), she quietly told them, “Me, I don’t have a smile.”

But things began to change as soon as she joined Hope Alive! At her very first Saturday Club, established students welcomed her with hugs and laughter. For Nandi, the warmth of those simple gestures broke through years of loneliness. “In a long run of five years, I have never felt this before,” she said.

“The smile and hug made some sparks of love within me, thank you so much.”

Since then, her smile has slowly returned, and with it, her laughter. She is learning to love herself, to trust others, and to dream beyond her past. “I used to tell my mother I wish to go to school for a good foundation,” Nandi shared. “She would encourage me to keep praying because one day I would get to return. God has answered my prayers, and I am the happiest!”

Nandi’s journey is a picture of what happens when love is poured into a child’s life. Where there was once loneliness and silence, now there is joy, laughter, and hope.