In Gayaza, Uganda, a remarkable story unfolds, showcasing the transformative power of baseball. The Dennis Uganda Baseball Academy, led by coach Paul Wafula, is more than just a sports program; it's a beacon of hope for orphans and disadvantaged children, offering them a chance to escape poverty and despair.
Baseball is a sport that offers hope and opportunity to children around the world.
The Genesis: From Slaughterhouse to Baseball Field
Paul Wafula's journey with Dennis Kasumba began in an unlikely place - a slaughterhouse. At just 14 years old, Dennis had dropped out of school and was working in the harsh environment of a slaughterhouse to earn a living.
Wafula recalled their first conversation: “I asked him why he was working in the slaughterhouse and he was like, ‘I want to have something to eat. We don’t have anything to eat at home.’”
Wafula, a volunteer baseball coach, offered Dennis a deal: leave the slaughterhouse, and he would be fed each time he came to the baseball field. When Dennis became a regular, Wafula sweetened the deal, offering to pay for him to return to school if he kept coming. This marked the start of a relationship that would solidify Wafula's belief in the sport's redemptive power and ignite Dennis's dream of becoming Uganda's first major leaguer.
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Coach Paul Wafula instructs Dennis Kasumba on his swing in Gayaza, Uganda. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
A Nation of Orphans and a Coach with a Vision
Dennis Kasumba's story is, unfortunately, not unique in Uganda. He never knew his parents; his father, a soldier, disappeared in the civil war, and his mother abandoned him and his siblings. In Uganda, nearly 2.5 million children - one in every nine - are orphans, often facing poverty and despair.
More than half a dozen of the boys and girls on Wafula’s sandlot team are orphans, which is why the coach uses baseball as a tool to teach larger lessons. “I want to show them that the biggest challenge you’re facing in life doesn’t mean that your life has ended,” he said. “I know how it feels at that age. When I was younger there were times I went without a meal. I know what it forces you to do.”
Wafula, who is just 10 years older than Kasumba, serves as more than just a baseball coach; he is a life coach who believes deeply in the power of sports to change lives, because it changed his. He grew up in a slum and understands the challenges these children face.
Wafula’s classroom is a bumpy field owned by a local church in Gayaza, a dusty, crowded crossroads about 15 miles from the center of Kampala, Uganda’s capital. There is an uneven dirt infield, two dugouts, a tiered concrete grandstand behind a flimsy wire backstop, and just the hint of a pitcher’s mound.
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Still, several boys and girls show up regularly, many of them barefoot, to play a sport that has drawn their attention because it is so rare in Uganda. But they really come to bask in the one thing they get from Wafula they can find nowhere else: attention and love.
Uganda’s massive orphan population was fueled primarily by respiratory disease and HIV/AIDS, which accounted for nearly a quarter of all deaths in the country as recently as 2018. But there are also tens of thousands of orphans who were just abandoned.
Together, Wafula and another coach, Ssempa Johnbosco, are caring for several children who are missing parents, giving them shelter and a baseball, the tools Wafula used to escape poverty.
The Dream: From Uganda to the Major Leagues
Despite the long odds, Dennis Kasumba dreams of playing in Major League Baseball (MLB). In a country where only about 2,500 people play baseball, and with only two South Africans having made it to the major leagues, his dream seems Quixotic.
Four years later, that hope feeds Kasumba’s big league dream, a Quixotic one in a country where only 2,500 people are estimated to be playing the game and on a continent that has produced just two major leaguers, both South Africans who combined to appear in 62 games between 2017 and 2022. “If I work hard,” Kasumba said in a voice barely above a whisper, “I think I can.”
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“The reason I’m working so hard is so that I can buy a big house for my grandmother,” he said.
Kasumba and his grandmother share a tiny brick-and-stucco house with seven others. Hidden down a narrow, rutted dirt road, the house has a concrete floor and no furniture or running water. A single, bare light bulb dangles from a cord in the center of each of the house’s three rooms and the air is thick with stench from the cow pens less than 50 yards from the front door.
This is the reality Kasumba hopes to escape through baseball.
Dennis Kasumba practices his swing as his grandmother Edith Natenza watches outside their home. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
The Training: Hard Work and Improvisation
Each morning, Dennis begins his day before sunrise, performing a rigorous workout using improvised equipment like old tires and water-filled plastic bottles. Wafula is there to encourage him, offering guidance and support.
So each morning, he pushes himself off a thin mattress just as the sun begins to peak over the horizon. The day will unfold just as the last one did and the one to follow: Kasumba will step into the muddy path in front of the house and perform a dizzying array of drills using, among other things, a stack of old tires, plastic bottles filled with water and a weathered blue backpack stuffed with rocks.
Wafula shows up about an hour into the workout and stands in mud and watches, sometimes calling out encouragement in English or Luganda, the Bantu language preferred in central Uganda.
“That’s it! That’s it,” the coach shouts, toggling between languages, often in the middle of a sentence. At other times he will step in and correct Kasumba’s posture or positioning to make sure the exercises work the right muscle groups.
“In Africa,” Wafula said later, “if you want to be better, you have to work harder.”
The unique workouts even earned him a two-minute segment on South Korean TV. “We have been getting attention from all over the world,” Wafula said. “He can’t afford a gym, so he has to improvise.”
In between workouts, he walked through the mud and puddles to a rickety cow pen and stepped barefoot into the mix of mud, manure and urine, mucking the stall in exchange for 4,000 Ugandan shillings, about $1.06. That will cover his food this day. Earlier in the morning, he fed the same cow to make a few cents to buy sugar for his grandmother’s tea.
Dennis Kasumba works out with old tires outside his home. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Challenges and Opportunities
Kasumba faces numerous challenges, including his size and the lack of resources. He is also an orphan, which makes obtaining a visa to travel to the United States difficult.
Then there’s Kasumba’s size, which is more suited to a soccer midfielder than to a catcher. Kasumba can reach 5 feet 7 if he stretches his spindly legs and stands on his tippy-toes. And he might weigh 150 pounds when he climbs, soaking wet, from the water-filled barrel he uses in his workouts.
One of the people who saw the videos is Joshua Williams, an Atlanta attorney with Taylor English Duma who has started a campaign to bring Kasumba to the United States. Williams recently secured an invitation for Kasumba to play in the MLB Draft League, an amateur summer league that opens June 1, if he can get a visa. Embassy rejecting the applications, ruling that Kasumba had insufficient family ties that would draw him back to Uganda.
It’s hard to prove family ties when you’re an orphan.
Despite these obstacles, his talent and determination have gained international attention. Scouts are increasingly visiting Uganda, and some players are getting opportunities to play abroad.
Not only has no Ugandan played in the majors, no one from his country had even played minor league baseball until last year when the Dodgers signed Ben Serunkuma, a 21-year-old relief pitcher, and Umar Male, a 21-year-old outfielder. This winter Gillespie and the Pirates signed pitcher David Matoma, a 17-year-old right-hander.
Baseball in Africa: A Growing Sport
The Dennis Uganda Baseball Academy is part of a larger movement to grow baseball in Africa. While the sport is still in its infancy in many countries, there is a growing passion for the game, especially among young people.
Baseball in Africa. Hearing that, many people would respond with a blank stare and something like, “Huh? But, yes. Really. There is baseball on the world’s second-largest and second-most populous continent.
Two South Africans, infielder Gift Ngoepe and pitcher Tayler Scott have played in MLB, Ngoepe being the first African-born player to reach the big leagues. Still, Africa remains squarely in the sleeping-giant category when it comes to baseball.
The Africa Baseball and Softball Association was formed in June 1990, though South Africa was, surprisingly, not one of its first members - perhaps because it was still under the apartheid system. The first African Baseball Cup was held in 1992, and baseball was first played in the All-Africa Games in 1999.
Although 23 African countries are members of the World Baseball and Softball Confederation (WBSC), that is less than half of the 54 officially recognized countries on the continent.
Those that have programs are often hindered by lack of funding, governmental awareness of the game, transportation, necessary equipment, and proper facilities. Many youths are from very low-income families and must work to help support their families. More coaches need to be trained, and more leagues need to be developed.
The Impact: More Than Just Baseball
For Wafula, he has seen the transformative power of baseball in action, not just with Kasumba but at the church-run home for disabled and disadvantaged children he and his team visit every week, both to lift up the kids there but also to let his players know that whatever hardships they’re facing, it could be worse.
“When I go to visit the disabled kids, I want all [my players] to travel with me and show the same love I show to them,” said Wafula, who said an older brother has been confined to a wheelchair since breaking his spine in a car accident 15 years ago. “These kids also want to be shown love, but they don’t have anyone.”
These are the orphans nobody wanted: children, some still in diapers, who are blind, missing a limb, unable to walk or dealing with a mental disability. It’s a sad place, one where the children sleep as many as three to a mattress in a stuffy room lined with bunk beds.
The program he has taken to the orphanage is one he borrowed from Miracle League, a Georgia-based group that uses baseball to help children with mental and physical disabilities make friends and become confident.
So Wafula’s players toss them plastic balls or string together plastic water bottles to fashion a bat for children too weak to hold a real one.
Baseball clinic in Uganda
The Dennis Uganda Baseball Academy is more than just a baseball program; it's a testament to the power of sports to transform lives, offering hope and opportunity to those who need it most.
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