Peter Mutabazi

What He Did

Peter Mutabazi was given exactly the childhood that produces, in most men, a life of bitterness or running.

His father in Uganda was abusive. He ran away at around age ten. He lived on the streets of Kampala — not as a metaphor, as actual reality — until a British missionary noticed him at a roadside fruit stand and started feeding him. That missionary helped get him into school. The whole rest of his life is downstream of that one stranger's decision to see a boy other people walked past.

He grew up. He became, by training and conviction, a worker for vulnerable children. He moved internationally. He saw the global foster and adoption system from the inside.

And he wanted to do for other kids what had been done for him.

He was told, repeatedly, that he could not. Single men in his line of sight did not foster. Single Black men in America fostered even less. The system was set up for two-parent white families. He believed, for years, that the door was closed.

One day a social worker said: actually, you could. He signed up that day. Five months later, his first foster child arrived. The placement was a blond white boy he assumed was at the wrong house. It was the moment he understood his calling: any child who needed a safe and loving home.

He has fostered close to thirty children since. In 2019, he became an American citizen and adopted a son. He continues to foster. He continues to flip houses to fund the work. He continues to do the unglamorous middle-of-the-night part of fatherhood that nobody puts on Instagram.

Why It Belongs Here

The Bible has very little patience for men who use their wounds as a reason not to father.

“A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling.” Psalm 68:5

God identifies Himself, by attribute, as father to the fatherless. Then He calls His sons to be the same. Mutabazi could have spent his life listing his reasons. I was abused. I was abandoned. I was a street kid. I am Black in a white-coded system. I am single. The door was closed.

Every reason he could have given would have been true.

He went and did it anyway.

Almost thirty children have known what it is to be received by a man, fed by a man, watched over by a man, and called known by a man — because Peter Mutabazi refused to use his orphanhood as an excuse not to be a father.

He took the wound and turned it into the doorway.

He took the wound. He made it a doorway.

This profile draws on Peter Mutabazi's own published account and the Focus on the Family interview. He has not been contacted for or endorsed this article. If he would like the profile amended or removed, please contact the site.