A boy in rural Kenya was weeks away from leaving school forever. A woman in Sweden wrote a check for fifteen dollars. Neither of them knew they were altering history.
In the 1970s, Chris Mburu was the top student in his district in Mitahato, Kenya, living in a mud house without electricity or running water. His academic performance was exceptional, but his family could not afford the modest school fees required to keep him enrolled. Without assistance, his education would have ended after primary school.
At the same time, in Sweden, Hilde Back enrolled in a child sponsorship program. A kindergarten teacher of modest means, she committed to sending approximately $15 per school term to support a boy she had never met. That boy was Chris Mburu.
Her contributions continued year after year, sustaining his education through primary and secondary school. They exchanged letters. She asked about his studies and teachers. He began to understand that behind the sponsorship was not an institution but a person.
Mburu excelled academically. He earned a law degree from the University of Nairobi, graduating at the top of his class. He later received a Fulbright scholarship to Harvard Law School and built a career in international human rights law, working with the United Nations on cases involving genocide and crimes against humanity.
Yet he had never properly thanked the woman who had made his education possible.
In 2001, Mburu founded a scholarship program in Kenya for academically talented students from impoverished families. He sought to locate his former sponsor in order to name the foundation in her honor. With assistance from the Swedish Embassy, he found her.
When they met in Sweden, Mburu expected a prominent philanthropist. Instead, he encountered a reserved elderly woman living a simple life. During the making of the documentary A Small Act, additional details of Back’s life emerged.
Hilde Back had been born in Germany in 1922 to a Jewish family. Under the Nazi regime’s anti-Jewish policies, she was barred from public school and, at sixteen, was sent to Sweden as a refugee. Swedish policy at the time did not permit her parents to accompany her. Her father later died in a concentration camp. Her mother was deported and never returned.
Back had survived because someone intervened on her behalf. Decades later, she quietly chose to intervene for someone else.
In 2003, she traveled to Kenya for the inauguration of the Hilde Back Education Fund and was honored by the local community. The fund has since supported nearly 1,000 students in continuing their education. Many beneficiaries now mentor others and contribute financially through an initiative known as “A Small Act Jamii.”
Hilde Back died on January 13, 2021, in Västerås, Sweden, at age 98.
A modest sponsorship sustained one child’s education. That child established a foundation. The foundation continues to support others.
The scale began with fifteen dollars and a decision to help a stranger.
