Places I have been privileged to serve

Moses Ndung'u founded Children's Garden Home in 2001 with a simple, radical idea: that children rescued from the streets of Nairobi deserved not just shelter, but a home — and not just an education, but a future.

I first walked through its gates in August 2011, with my wife Jin and our daughter Robyn. We had come for three months. Fifteen years later, I am still returning.

Over those fifteen years, a quiet community of generous people across Singapore and beyond has channelled resources into this home — funding teachers' salaries, repairing kitchens, expanding chicken farms, building classrooms, erecting a perimeter wall, launching a student journalism blog, creating a social business called Tartfully Yours that employs youth with special needs, constructing a Special Education School Block, and most recently, installing the first phase of a solar electrification system.

I have been the conduit for much of this. The generosity has always belonged to others.

The children call me Daddy Alvin. I do not take this lightly. It is the most serious responsibility of my life outside my own family — and the most joyful.

What I have watched, year after year, is Stanley Kitili — rescued off the streets at age seven — grow into a teacher at an international school who comes back on weekends to mentor his younger brothers and sisters. That is the oak from the acorn. That is everything.

In 2007, a family trip originally bound for India was diverted to Thailand due to a visa issue. Wandering in Chiang Rai, we befriended the Watasittikul rice farming family who showed us a kind of hospitality and simplicity that I have never forgotten.

We returned the following year to plant and harvest rice alongside them. From that experience grew TigerlandRiceFarm — an eco-vacation programme that brings urban families to experience the rhythm of rice farming, creating a secondary income stream for the family and a genuine encounter with a way of life most of us have never known.

It began as a happy accident and became a small lesson in what social enterprise can look like when it grows organically from relationship rather than strategy.