Growing up with single parents was not easy. Despite us having great higher education, our parents were poor and struggled to provide for our basic needs including school products. For example, when my father passed away, mother and I together with my siblings moved from the city to the village where the closest elementary school was about 16 miles away. One day, in my first grade, I was walking back from school with friends and we decided to stop by the river to cool off. On our way to the village that evening, I realized I had lost my pencil. I was so afraid to face my mother because I knew how much she would whip me. It was such a relief when the next morning on my way to school I found that pencil by the riverbank.
When we moved to the United States of America, I noticed that the Dollar stores here sold 20 pencils for One dollar. This was very exciting to me. With our minimal income, we decided to begin buying pencils and sending those to rural schools in Zambia. As time went by and our income improved, we started adding pens, books, toothbrushes & toothpaste, underwear, socks and used clothes plus more. We decided to make this project official by registering it with the State of Missouri as One Dream Foundation. We believe that everyone deserves at least a chance to dream; even it's just one dream. This is a nonprofit foundation with the main focus of helping humanity around the world. We are a 501c3 tax-exempted organization.
So many friends and family have died along the way and one that stands out the most is when my young sister carried her sick baby on her back to take her to the nearest health center, which was over 20 miles away. The baby had diarrhea and by the time she reached the clinic, the baby had died on her back already and she was not even aware. I met Dr. Mathew German, a medical doctor (friends of ours) just about the time I received the bad funeral news. I shared that with him and he suggested we start sending medical help to clinics in Zambia, Africa. We decided we could add the hospital to our 'building the Ivy League University' project. Not just a hospital but a research medical center, considering people are still dying from so many curable diseases i.e. malaria.
While we have continued doing our shipping of basic school & medical supplies as some of our short term goals, we've gone ahead and secured land for our long term goal ' building the University, Green/Solar Hospital & research Center. This is about 130 Hectares or 325 Acres of land and it is located in Mumbwa District ' Central Province, about 140 km (85 miles) from the capital city Lusaka, Zambia.
We have two architects, a land surveyor, graphic and marketing team currently working on this long-term project. We are the possibility.
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