He caddied for $1 a bag. Now, he’s fostering hope through the game

W

hen Isaiah Mwesige was 11, cancer took his mother, leaving him an orphan. His father had died eight years before.

The third-youngest of eight children, growing up in western Uganda, Isaiah moved in with an older brother and dropped out of school so that he could look for work. Agriculture was the region’s meager mainstay. Isaiah’s parents had been subsistence farmers. Their son found a different route.

“I met a boy in our area who said he had a job as a caddie,” says Isaiah, now 29. “He told me I could work as a caddie, too.”

At the time, Isaiah knew as much about golf as the average golfer knows about Uganda, an East African country of some 48 million people with a faint connection to the game. Uganda has just 16 courses. The nearest to Isaiah was Toro Golf Club, a nine-hole layout, built by British colonists in the early 1900s, in the city of Fort Portal, five miles away.

Isaiah donned his best clothes and walked to the club.

The other boy was right. Toro needed loopers. The going rate per round amounted to a dollar, which was decent money. But the bags were big and Isaiah was small. Struggling to keep up as he carried, he turned to hawking balls instead.