(gentle piano music)
- I was born and raised in Uganda.
If you ask anybody in fact, growing up was such a big stigma
about Banda as one of the largest slums in the country.
Bad water, crime, alcoholism,
and all kinds of bad things.
As a young boy, I was very afraid
to tell people where I lived.
For a very long time,
that actually had a huge impact on my self-esteem
because I was never proud of my home.
In 2005, I lost my father to a heart disease.
And my father had worked so hard to take us to school.
In that moment when I lost my father, everything changed.
I could no longer go to school.
He was the sole provider.
For as long as I remember,
we lived off $1.50 every single day.
I was involved in a project, N-G-Y-G-C-E
that was sponsored by the US state government.
The world does an Africa-wide competition.
I got selected as the finalist, went to New York City
for my first time in 2011.
Fascinating experience, got on a plane for my first time.
I remember getting to Connecticut and GPS on the car
was speaking, I was so fascinated
and I went back home and told my mother,
Mom, in America, I saw cars that speak.
But because that trip was sponsored
by the US state government, it now opened
fascinating doors for me to America.
And when I finished high school,
couldn't go to college.
I was out volunteering at an orphanage.
We had missionaries from Memphis come visit the orphanage.
They met me.
They asked me, "Joel, what do you want to do?"
I said, I want to be an architect.
Well, I didn't know that one of them,
Rusty Bloodworth who later became my mentor,
was a practicing architect.
He had been a very successful architect for 50 years.
And out of his relationships with people
out of Memphis, several people came together
and literally put over $200,000 together
to take me through undergraduate.
Coming to a world-class institution
to get your master's in architecture
not only creates opportunities to learn
and challenge yourself, but I also believe
that whoever is given much, much is expected out of them.
I've been working on the orphanage
that I actually used to be a part of in Uganda.
I, you know, went to Scott Marble,
the chair of the architecture program,
and I said, hey there's this opportunity
to help this community 8,000 miles away.
And to really think about how do we advance the idea
that Georgia Tech is a global institution
and it's training global practitioners.
To me, that was the main reason why I came to Georgia Tech,
that I knew because of the plethora
of people who are here from all over the world.
There is an opportunity to change communities
beyond growing rich, beyond where internet coverage.
We ended up actually creating a design class,
a design seminar that I'm now teaching,
that I've spent the whole semester master-planning
this small community and the orphanage
and designing dwelling units for the orphans in that school.
The story of my time at Georgia Tech,
before Georgia Tech, in the slum, in America
and the work that I'm doing now,
has been a plethora of so many people along the way
who've believed in me, who said yes,
who've given me rides, who've said,
"Joel, will you come and dine with us?",
who said, "Joel, yes we can help you with this."
It's a story, I don't think it's my own story.
It's a story that is shared by so many champions
that have come along the way.
I'm excited but I'm nervous a little bit,
but it's been really wonderful, Johnny.
And I think it's only the beginning.
It's only the beginning.