Some revolutions start with slogans. This one started with a nurse handing over his own food ration.

Based on a podcast with Edrine Kitamirike and host Philipp Kobald

The Village Where Generosity Needed Paperwork

There’s a certain absurdity to goodness. Try giving away medicine you bought with your own pay and someone will ask for a permit. That’s where we meet Edrine Kitamirike — registered nurse, active-duty soldier in the Uganda People’s Defence Force, and the founding pulse behind Pure Heart Charity Foundation — who discovered that compassion, ungated and unbranded, frequently collides with the small print of real life. He was posted to a remote area and people began arriving: hungry, ill, and out of options. He treated them, fed them from his own stipend, and was promptly taught the first rule of doing good in hard places: formalize it or face friction. So he registered an organization — not to make his heart official, but to make it survivable.

“Education as the Real Medicine”

When the sticking plasters ran out, the plan expanded. You can stabilize a fever with antibiotics, but you cure a community by changing the odds. As host Philipp Kobald put it, the way forward is “education as the real medicine,” a line that lands like a bell in this conversation not because it’s poetic, but because it’s painfully practical. — Philipp Kobald.

In Karamoja — stunning mountains, mineral wealth, and a drumbeat of danger — school is often thirty kilometers away, which might as well be the moon when you’re ten and barefoot. Cattle raiding turns children into orphans and wives into widows. Girls are married off early because school is distant, expensive, or both. You can’t study when the nearest classroom is a day’s walk and the nearest threat is much closer. This is the terrain Edrine walks each week, and the reason he wants to anchor a different future in bricks and chalk.

From Band-Aids to Blueprints

The vision is brazen and strangely simple: build a free orphanage school in the community, hand the building to local leadership, and negotiate the staffing with nearby government schools. Keep costs low so families who can pay something do; cover the rest for those who can’t. The budget is concrete: $150,000 to finish by 2026. A number large enough to feel impossible, small enough to be embarrassing to ignore. It’s the kind of figure that, in the right room, evaporates into napkin math; here, it’s a campus, a library, a kitchen, a promise.

Pure Heart’s path hasn’t been paved with donors so much as detours. A GoFundMe exists. A bank account sits ready. A German friend has bought books and pens. A UK grant application collapsed because an “overseas organization” needed an in-country contact the team didn’t yet have. Impact, in other words, is rarely blocked by cynicism; it’s usually blocked by admin. And yet the plan persists, because persistence is how vision outruns inconvenience.

Faith That Gets Mud on Its Boots

The engine here isn’t saviorism; it’s scripture reinterpreted as logistics. Edrine cites the Matthew 25 charge — what you do for “the least,” you do for God — then translates it into food rations, clinic visits, and school fees. The spirituality on offer isn’t the kind that floats; it kneels, signs, queues, and lifts. It also nags. The question isn’t whether you feel moved; it’s whether you move. “Don’t say that you’ll give tomorrow,” he says, voice steady. “No… giving time is today giving.” — Edrine Kitamirike.

This is not a dare to empty your bank account. It’s a dare to interrogate your story about why you can’t. Perhaps the most subversive line in the episode is the shortest: “stealing is not the only option.” He’s talking to boys who are offered weapons before they’re offered textbooks, but he’s also talking to us — about the theft of attention, the robbery of empathy by our perpetual scroll. — Edrine Kitamirike.

The Quiet Radicalism of Connection

Money helps. Obviously. But connection lubricates everything money can’t reach. The school needs a structural engineer and a storyteller; a head teacher and the kind of friend who knows a grant officer’s first name. It needs someone to repost an update and someone to wire in-kind supplies. It needs, frankly, witnesses — because projects endure when they’re seen. This, too, is the slow spirituality at work: not ecstatic moments, but a long fidelity to people you’ll probably never meet.

And yes, the place is dangerous at times. It’s also absurdly beautiful. Karamoja’s ridgelines don’t absolve the raids, but they do insist that we widen the frame. A schoolyard here would hold more than children; it would hold a narrative: that you can grow up where you are and still change where you’re going. That the future doesn’t have to be imported; it can be taught.

A Spirituality That Pays Its Bills

HolisticCircle’s Spiritual Conversation, hosted by Philipp Kobald, doesn’t pretend prayers lay bricks. It puts a microphone in front of people who do. The genius of this episode is its immunity to piety without practice. Edrine is a nurse who became a soldier who became a founder because each role is a different way of saying the same sentence: I am responsible for what I can touch. The show meets him there, refusing to flatten him into a trope, letting the complexity breathe: the bureaucracy, the raids, the early marriages, the shoes that never quite fit, the school uniform that turns a child into a student.

If You’re Looking for a Sign

Perhaps the most uncomfortable spiritual proposition today is not whether the divine exists, but whether we’ll behave as though each other does. You don’t have to believe what Edrine believes to believe in what he’s building. You only have to accept a less glamorous truth: that meaning is forged in maintenance, that salvation — if the word still earns its keep — looks a lot like a ledger balancing teacher salaries and porridge for lunch.

There’s a sentence I can’t shake: a school is where a society decides to stop lying to its children. Karamoja has been lied to — by distance, by history, by the seductive arithmetic of raiding. A school is a counter-argument. It says the mind is a frontier worth fighting for, that the first literacy is the literacy of possibility, that geography is not destiny when a classroom lives down the road.

And if you’re the kind of seeker who is allergic to easy answers, here’s the paradox worth pocketing: the real mystics are often the realists. They place orders, draft budgets, and build things that outlast moods. They know that the holy isn’t only in the sky; it’s in the scaffolding.

Watch the full conversation on the @HolisticCircle YouTube channel; it’s an hour that replaces abstraction with a map.

Guest bio

Edrine Kitamirike is a registered nurse and an active-duty soldier with the Uganda People’s Defence Force who serves as CEO of Pure Heart Charity Foundation.

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By Philipp Kobald in cooperation with AI
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