In Bertoua, with a family: our first steps on the ground

When the foundation was born in November 2024, we knew one thing for certain: our first gestures would not be speeches. They would be encounters. Visits. Sacks of rice set down on the ground. Eyes meeting in a dusty courtyard in Bertoua, in eastern Cameroon.

This family was one of those first encounters. Nine people under the same roof — including seven children, among them triplets. A family that life had pushed to the edge — and that our volunteers went to see without ceremony: simply to understand, and to act.

November 2024: the first visit

The home is borrowed. Unfinished. No doors, no windows. Rain, wind, insecurity: everything gets in. There are no beds or mattresses — everyone sleeps on the floor. Food is scarce. So are clothes. The children are not in school, for lack of means.

I write to you from Belgium. It is our volunteers on the ground who walked through that open door onto emptiness. What they sent me — photos, messages, a short video — was enough to measure the urgency. Not to pity. To decide.

For a clearer sense of what this precarity looks like day to day, here is the filmed account of that first meeting:

December 2024: concrete food aid

Understanding is not enough. In December, we returned — no longer only to listen, but to fill the most immediate void: the empty plate.

Rice, powdered milk, oil, iodized salt, soap, basic staples. Not an abstract “kit”: sacks, jerrycans, and boxes set in front of a cinder-block house under the Bertoua sun. Around them, children. A mother who smiles. And the certainty, for a few weeks at least, that hunger steps back.

The report on this action is here:

This is only a beginning

Food aid is not a destiny awakened. It is a safety net. A breath. What comes next is already clear to us: schooling for the children from the 2025/2026 academic year, the search for a decent and secure home, and support for the parents toward income-generating activity.

At Awaken Destiny, we do not only want to ease urgency. We want the families we meet to be able, one day, to stand on their own. This family is on that path.