The first time we saw Tunde, he was five years old and burning with fever on a mat outside an uncompleted building in Agege.
His eyes were glazed. His breathing was shallow. The woman who had been caring for him — a distant neighbor, not a relative — said he had been that way for four days. She had no money for a clinic. She had given him paracetamol crushed in water and prayed.
He was not getting better. He was disappearing.
Our volunteer medical team arrived during a routine community outreach that Saturday morning. Dr. Seun took one look at Tunde and went straight to work. Severe malaria, complicated by dehydration and malnutrition. Without intervention that day, Dr. Seun told us later, Tunde would not have survived the weekend.
We moved him immediately.
That night was difficult. Our volunteers took turns sitting with him. His temperature spiked twice. At one point around 2am, the room went very quiet and everyone held their breath.
Then, slowly, the fever began to break.
By Sunday morning, Tunde opened his eyes properly for the first time. He looked around the room at the exhausted volunteers who had stayed up for him — people he had never met before, who had no obligation to him, who stayed anyway. He looked at all of them and said, in a small, hoarse voice:
"I want rice."
— Tunde, age 5 — his first words after the fever brokeThe room erupted in laughter and tears at the same time.
Tunde recovered fully over the following two weeks. He is now a healthy, loud, wonderfully stubborn five-year-old who has strong opinions about everything and refuses to eat beans under any circumstances.
He is enrolled in a nursery school. He has been adopted into the care network of a HopeRising volunteer family in Agege who couldn't let him go after everything. He calls the woman "Aunty" — but the way he says it sounds exactly like "Mummy."
A child almost died because he had no one and no money and no luck. Your donation changed all three of those things in one night.
That is what HopeRising Foundation is.