There was no ceremony. No bow. No big moment.
My mom just set it down in front of me one evening after I passed grade 10. An old laptop. Secondhand, scratched up, barely holding together. The battery was completely dead — it only worked if you kept it plugged into the wall. The moment you unplugged it, it died.
I didn't care.
I stayed up that night. And the night after that. Teaching myself how it worked. Clicking through everything. Learning what computers could do, what I could do with them. I was 16 years old, growing up in Namibia, and that half-broken machine cracked open a door I didn't know existed.
What my mom didn't say that night — what I only understood much later — was how much that gift cost her.
My family were refugees. We had fled our home in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2002 and made it to Namibia with almost nothing. For years, we rebuilt slowly, quietly, with the kind of resilience that doesn't announce itself. We didn't have much. But somehow, my mom found a way to hand her son a window to the world.
In 2018, we got word that changed everything. We had been approved for a refugee asylum program — we were going to America.
San Diego.
I arrived in a new country with a new language to navigate, a new system to figure out, and the same quiet determination I'd always had. I was sent to Urban Corps to earn an American high school diploma. To keep money coming in, I worked nights — cleaning Petco Park after games, long after the crowds had gone home and the stadium fell silent.
I showed up. Every time.
Because I worked in recycling, a company called Enviro Green came in one day to run a short course on fixing computers.
I lit up.
Of everyone in that room, I stood out. The instructor noticed. By the end of the course, I had been offered a job.
I spent the next few years at Enviro Green learning everything — how to diagnose a failing hard drive, how to refurbish a device that looked completely dead and make it run like new, how the entire recycling industry worked from the inside. I was good at it. More than good. I loved it.
Then COVID hit. The business contracted. I was let go.
I could have walked away from it all.
A lot of people would have.
But I kept thinking about that laptop. The one that only worked plugged in. The one my mom somehow found for me. The one that changed the direction of my life.
And I started thinking about all the kids who hadn't gotten one yet.
Kids in places like where I grew up. Smart kids. Curious kids. Kids who would stay up all night if someone just handed them the right tool. Kids who weren't waiting for charity — they were waiting for a chance.
So I built TruHelp PC.
Not because it was the safe move. Not because it made obvious business sense. Because I know something most people only imagine: that a donated device isn't just hardware.
I've lived that moment. I know what it feels like from the inside. And now every device that comes through TruHelp PC — picked up from a home in San Diego, wiped clean, brought back to life — carries that same possibility to someone waiting on the other side of the world.
Your old laptop is more than you think it is.
I know. I had one just like it.