Roger was told his legs would be amputated.
Roger and his wife Cissy had given years of their lives to running an orphanage in Uganda. Roger also worked as a social worker — travelling between communities, doing the quiet work that no one much notices until it's gone.
On the way back from one of those trips, Roger was in a serious road accident. His co-worker was killed. Roger survived, but with both legs badly broken. Strangers found him at the scene — and before help came, they emptied his pockets. His monthly wage was gone.
The strangers who did help brought him to a free clinic along the Nile. The clinic assessed his injuries and gave their verdict: both legs would need to be amputated.
Cissy called us in New Zealand, frightened and not knowing what to do.
We felt strongly that Roger needed to be moved — to a different facility further along the river, the Nile International Hospital. It seemed like a long shot. There was no money, no guarantee, and no plan. But Cissy trusted it and found a way to get Roger there.
The doctors there examined him carefully. They said they could save his legs.
In Uganda, no hospital is truly free.
If you know Uganda, you know this: care is rarely free, even when it is supposed to be. Patients who cannot pay are sometimes held — kept in hospital until their bill is settled. It is illegal, but it happens. The Walter Foundation has seen it.
So Roger's legs were set, x-rayed, and placed in casts — and the bill began to grow. We sent word that we would cover what we could. We had almost nothing, but we kept our word, sending money in small amounts as we found it. A hundred dollars here. What we could scrape together there.
A week after Roger was stabilised, Cissy began complaining of stomach pain she had been carrying for months. A transfer to Kampala International Hospital was arranged. Tests were run. The diagnosis was a serious infection in her large intestine — a condition requiring a colonoscopy procedure. Expensive, in a private hospital, in Kampala.
We told Cissy to tell them we would cover it. We still had almost nothing.
NZD 4,500 was raised in total — through a friend in Whangārei who gave NZD 500, through others who heard the story and were moved to help, through small amounts found in difficult places. Cissy had her surgery. She wore a colostomy bag for a month while her infection cleared, then underwent a second procedure to reconnect her intestine. Roger's legs healed.
While they were in hospital, a patient in the next room quietly began sharing their daily meal with Roger and Cissy — who could not afford food. Small kindnesses, from strangers, in the middle of crisis.
Then their son Walter died.
We thought the worst was over. Roger's legs had been saved. Cissy had recovered from surgery. After everything they had been through, it felt like the journey was finally turning toward something good.
Then Roger and Cissy's son Walter became ill. An unknown condition that doctors couldn't discover, made it difficult for him to breathe. We could not find a way to help and sadly Walter died.
There are no words that fit a loss like that. After all that Roger and Cissy had survived — the accident, the amputation threat, the surgeries, the months of uncertainty — to lose their son was a grief of a different kind entirely.
We could not save Walter. But we could make sure his name meant something. That it stood for something lasting — a fund built so that other families might not face what his family faced. A pool of people choosing, together, to make sure that cost is never the reason someone cannot get care.
That is why this is called the Walter Foundation. It is his memorial. And it is our commitment to keep building it in his name.
What if there had been a fund in place?
That experience — scrambling for money, watching a hospital system threaten to turn away a man who couldn't pay, seeing what was possible when people simply chose to help — left us asking a question we couldn't let go of.
What if Roger and Cissy had already been part of a community fund? What if NZD 5.50 a week, pooled across hundreds of members, had meant they never had to wait on someone in New Zealand to find a hundred dollars before their care continued?
That is why the Walter Foundation Community Health Pool exists. Not to replace the kindness of individuals — but to make that kindness structural. Reliable. Already there.
This story has a faith dimension that cannot honestly be separated from it. The Walter Foundation began in Oxford, New Zealand — not with a business plan, but with a simple prayer: Lord, here we are. How would you use us?
The direction to move Roger to a different hospital, the sense of bearing Cissy's pain in the days before her surgery, the inexplicable provision of money at each moment it was needed — none of it fits neatly into an organisational story. But it is the true one. Roger said that watching God work through others in his darkest moment restored his faith. It grew ours too.
We are grateful, and humbled, that we were asked to stand in the gap for people we had never met — and now feel we have known for a long time.
Join the pool. Be the fund.
UGX 11,880 a week — NZD 5.50. No exclusions. No paperwork. Claims paid directly to approved providers in Uganda.