By the time Peter Mutabazi moved to America, he had survived a heart-wrenching childhood.

His family lived in a village on the border of Uganda and Rwanda, unable to afford anything but the food they could grow themselves and walking hours each day to fetch clean water.

To top it off, his father was physically and verbally abusive to the whole family, beating Matubazi’s mother and denying his children food when he was angry.

The boy ran away from home at the age of 10 after his father sent him out for cigarettes and a rainstorm ruined them. Knowing the abuse that lay ahead, he struck out on his own instead.

So it’s no surprise that as a successful businessman now living in Oklahoma, he would have a soft spot in his heart for children whose families were unfit to care for them.

Mutabazi worked hard to become a foster parent for those in need.

He took his job as a reliable guardian seriously as a pair of brothers, ages 4 and 10, came into his home – and his heart – for 7 months.

And while he was happy to see a family reunited, he was also heartbroken when a judge decided that they would be returned to their biological parents immediately after a court hearing one day.

So when he received a call from a social worker asking him to take in an 11-year-old boy for the weekend soon after that, he wasn’t sure his heart could handle it.

“She had a way of always convincing me that it was the right child at the right time and boy was she right, especially in this situation,” Mutabazi recalled in a story posted on Love What Matters.

He asked no questions, assuming that after 2 days of care, the boy would find a more permanent place to live.

Then he met Anthony.

“I stood strong in my decision not to ask why he was in foster care. I was determined not to attach emotionally to any more children until I was ready. I told him he could call me ‘Mr. Peter’ and 20 minutes after his arrival, he asked if he could call me ‘Dad.’ What? I didn’t even know his last name, yet he was asking to call me ‘Dad.’ This was not typical, as most children in foster care initially want to remind you that you are not their father and ‘never will be.’”

Despite the boy trying to make a connection, Mutabazi was convinced he didn’t have the emotional energy that a child would need at that point and made sure the social worker would be there to pick up Anthony on time the following Monday. It was on their final day together that he finally decided to ask why the child was in foster care.

The answer left him stunned.

The boy had been abandoned by his biological mother at the age of two and was placed with a family that had served as elders at her church. They adopted him at the age of 4 but then did something inexplicable – something Mutabazi didn’t even know was possible.

The family took Anthony to the hospital at age 11 and abandoned him there in what is known as a “failed adoption.”

“They signed an agreement relinquishing their parental rights and never looked back.”

No one knew why, including Anthony.

The story shook the foster father to his core.

“This broke my heart into a million pieces. How could a human being, much less a child, be dropped off like that? How could they just walk away after all of these years without the longing to see him or hear his voice again? As I sat there crying helplessly, I asked, ‘Where will they be taking him?’ I was told there were no family members to reach out to and there were no foster homes available at the time, so he would be leaving my home and going straight to a group home. There was no way I was going to let that happen.”

The man Anthony had already started calling “dad” enrolled him in school immediately and said he would continue to foster him.

Then, he decided to adopt Anthony.

At age 13, the two gentlemen who had saved each other finally shared a last name.

And two weeks later, in November of 2019, the hard-working foster father officially became an American citizen – one we should all be proud to have.

He has even continued to foster more children!

“I have fostered eleven children in the past three years and Anthony has been right beside me through it all. He has read more than 500 books in the last 19 months and has quickly made a number of amazing friends at church, school, and in the foster community. I’m amazed at how resilient and positive he is, despite all that he has had to endure.”

Is life perfect all the time? Of course not.

But neither of them would trade it for the world.

Be sure to follow the duo’s adventures on their Instagram account by clicking here.

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Source: Bored Panda, Love What Matters, @fosterdadflipper via Instagram