Peter Mutabazi with his children, Anthony, Bella, Isabella, Luke and Zay. Photo / the Washington Post
Peter Mutabazi does not have happy memories from when he was a child.
At 10, he ran away from his parents’ home in Uganda to escape a difficult childhood, he said.
He was homeless for five years. He described his childhood as being defined by hunger, poverty, loneliness and survival.
“I felt unloved and unwanted,” he said.
Now, at age 51, he’s a dad of six – three adopted children, and three more he is in the process of adopting.
He has fostered 47 children since 2017, and he’s done it as a single father.
“I knew I could understand them and their trauma, because I had walked that journey,” said Mutabazi, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the United States.
Mutabazi was born in a small village at the border of Uganda and Rwanda.
“Life was really miserable because of poverty,” he said. “I didn’t feel hope. I didn’t see it. For me, hoping was lying to myself.”
“I became a street kid,” he said. “Think of a stray animal, how stray animals are treated in some countries. That’s how they treated street kids in Uganda.”
He said he learned how to survive by helping people carry their groceries to their cars in exchange for food. One day, he tried helping a man with his groceries, and “that was the only day where someone didn’t treat me like an animal”, Mutabazi said.
From then on, whenever the man went shopping for food, he gave Mutabazi something to eat. After a year and a half, the man offered to send Mutabazi to boarding school.
“That changed my life forever,” Mutabazi said.
He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree at Makerere University in Kampala and later moved to London to study crisis management at Oak Hill College.
He moved to the US in 2002 to study theology at the Master’s University in Santa Clarita, California.
“I wanted to learn new things,” Mutabazi said.
He has since dedicated his career to working for child advocacy organisations. He started at Compassion International in 2006 and now works at World Vision as a senior advocate.
“I have always worked for charities that help children,” Mutabazi said.
But he wanted to do more.
“When I came to the United States, I really struggled seeing how much food was thrown away when I lost members of my family for a lack of beans and potatoes,” Mutabazi said.
“This person shared with me that there are kids in the United States that had no food, and he explained more about fostering.
“I was like, wait a minute, I feel like I can relate to these kids. I thought I ought to do something for others.”
Initially, though, “I thought I wasn’t qualified because I was single”, Mutabazi said, adding that he started researching and learned that wasn’t true. He enrolled in a licensing class for foster parents and fostered his first child in 2017.
Mutabazi said his goal with foster care is for the children to ultimately go back to their families.
“You’re giving an opportunity for the parents to go through whatever they need to, and my belief is that the kids should go back to their parents,” he said. “I will foster until the child has somewhere to go. If there is no one else, I want to be their final dad.”
Mutabazi adopted his first child, Anthony, in 2019. Anthony came to him in 2018 as an 11-year-old and was supposed to only stay for one weekend.
The first weekend they spent together, “he looked at me and said, ‘can I call you my dad?’ and I said, ‘no you can’t call me dad because you’re leaving on Monday,’” Mutabazi recalled. “He said, ‘I’m 11 and I was told I could choose who my father is and I’m choosing you.’”
Before long, “I came to find he didn’t have anywhere to go,” Mutabazi said. “After knowing I was going to be his dad, his life really changed.”
Anthony Mutabazi, now 19, said he knew right away he wanted Mutabazi to be his father.
“I just had this gut feeling,” Anthony Mutabazi said. “He has just been there by my side, helping to support me in finding myself.”
“Ultimately I want to follow in his footsteps, and help others,” he said, adding that he also hopes to become an advocate for foster children. “It’s just amazing that he cares so much when some people care so little ... my dad has been a great influence.”
Mutabazi went on to adopt Luke and Isabella, biological siblings, in 2023. He started fostering them when they were 5 and 6 in 2020, after their grandparents could no longer care for them.
Mutabazi is currently fostering three other children – Bella, 3, Zay, 21, and Jacob, 10 – and he is adopting all three. Bella is the biological sister of Luke and Isabella.
“I always want to keep siblings together,” he said. “It lessens the trauma.”
Jacob is Mutabazi’s most recent foster child. He arrived at his home about three months ago.
Although it was initially an adjustment when his father adopted more children, Anthony Mutabazi said he loves gaining new siblings.
“I have all these people that I can call family,” he said. “It’s been wonderful.”
Mutabazi said raising six children is challenging, to be sure. He also has two dogs – Simba, a 4-year-old goldendoodle, and Rafiki, a 3-year-old labradoodle.
“As a single dad, it’s hard,” he said. “Your whole life is about your kids, from when they wake up to when they go to bed.”
“Also, you’re parenting kids with trauma, so you’ve got to learn how to truly be there for them,” he said.
Plus, as a black man parenting white children, Mutabazi said he’s been stopped by police 11 times. He carries his foster and adoption papers with him.
People ask questions and make comments “every day, everywhere we go”, Mutabazi said, adding that he takes in children of all races and ethnicities.
“They always say ‘can you prove to us you’re the father?’ I’ve learned to not let that bother me.”
His focus is on the kids.
“I really feel it’s a calling,” Mutabazi said.
Mutabazi has written two books – one about his life story, and another about lessons he has learned as a foster dad – and his fostering efforts have been covered widely in the news media, including in local and national publications.
He has amassed a large following on social media, where he shares snippets of his daily life with his children in the hope of educating and inspiring prospective foster parents, and reducing the stigma surrounding foster children.
“The best way I could do that was to truly be open about it and share it,” he said. “I wanted to show the positive side about how we can be there for kids who need us the most.”
Ken Maxwell, the executive director of Seven Homes – the foster care agency that places children with Mutabazi – said Mutabazi has touched the lives of many children.
“I’ve had kids that Peter is probably the only person that could reach this child,” he said.
“He seems to have a knack for getting kids, figuring out what they need and then providing that ... it’s a life passion for Peter and you can see that in his work.”
Maxwell said he appreciates that Mutabazi always prioritises reuniting his foster children with their families.
“I’ve had him drive clear across the state multiple times so that a sibling group he had could see their [mum], and that turned into a reunification,” he said.
Maxwell believes Mutabazi’s childhood challenges shaped his approach to fatherhood.
“It gives him compassion for kids in similar situations, and kids that are in trouble, because he lived it and someone helped him,” Maxwell said. “It’s probably what has motivated him to continue to do this for many years.”
Mutabazi plans to broaden his advocacy work by training foster parents and working to improve the foster care system.
“Those are the things I am passionate about that I would love to impart in the future,” he said.
He is now raising funds to do bedroom makeovers for foster children to make them feel more at home.
Mutabazi said his life is proof that a painful past doesn’t always determine the future.
“I know there’s hope because I am the example,” he said. “I overcame.”
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