Building a Bitcoin School in Rural Bugiri

More than a hundred children. Four classroom blocks. Twenty-two staff on payroll. A campus paid for, almost entirely, in sats. The story starts with thirty-four people I had mostly never met.

On 3 May 2023 I opened a crowdfunding campaign on Geyser called Take-Brindon to BTC Prague.

The ask was 5.9 million sats. About $1,690 at the time. Bitcoin Ekasi had given me a free conference ticket. The rest — visa, flight, four nights of accommodation, food, a little transport, a little sightseeing — I did not have. So I put it on a page and asked.

Thirty-four people sent the money in.

The campaign closed at 6,160,522 sats — slightly over target. I got on the plane.

That flight is where this school starts.

The Booth at BTC Prague

I walked into the Bitcoin Circular Economies booth at BTC Prague 2023 like the rest of the attendees. I came out with a different brief.

The conversation was simple. You have a community. Bring Bitcoin home to it. Use it for the things that money is actually for — food, school fees, salaries, dignity. Not slogans.

I did not need convincing. I needed an address. I needed somewhere specific to put the next stack of sats.

I went back to Uganda looking for the place that test would land hardest.

I found it in Bugiri.

Bugiri — the Only School in Ten Kilometres

Bugiri District sits in eastern Uganda, on the road between Kampala and the Kenyan border. Rural. Mostly subsistence. The kind of place the development brochures pass through without stopping.

Uganda has 2.9 million orphans. About thirteen percent of the country’s children. Nearly half the country is under fifteen. Those national numbers do nothing for you until you stand inside the building they describe.

I went to an orphanage called Orphans of Uganda.

On that first visit we came in with the Bitcoin toolkit. A team of four. A Bitcoinize point-of-sale device. Fourteen bolt cards. The Fruits for 10 sats menu — ten sats for a piece of fruit at break time. Children who had never opened a bank account tapped a card against a reader and walked away with a banana.

The demo did what demos do.

And on one of those early visits, a small boy followed us around, eager to introduce himself. He had given himself a name:

— What’s your name?
— Mr. Bitcoin.
— Louder.
— Mr. Bitcoin.
— Why Mr. Bitcoin? What is Bitcoin?
— It is the digital currency.

But the same visit also showed us what was actually missing.

Seventy-seven children. No electricity. Children sleeping on reed mats. The few beds that existed were dilapidated. The orphanage did not have plates. The orphanage did not have toothbrushes.

The interventions that followed, in the weeks after, weren’t Bitcoin at all:

• Painted the place.
• Bought seventy-seven beds and mattresses.
• Two pairs of bed sheets for every child.
• The orphanage’s first set of plates.
• The orphanage’s first toothbrushes and toothpaste.

That is not the part of the story donors usually want to hear. It is the part that was actually missing.

The children were going somewhere during the day. They were going to Starlight Elementary School — the only school within ten kilometres of where they slept. The caretaker who had run the orphanage since 2007 walked them there himself. The school took them in. It did not have the resources to do it properly, but it did it.

That is the school this story is about.

The Schools Inspector Showed Up

Some months later, the schools inspector from Bugiri District turned up at Starlight.

He went through the place and flagged it. Not enough buildings. Not enough desks. Not enough chalkboards. Not enough study materials. Not enough teaching staff. Not up to ministry standard.

The school had been solely funded by its director for years — bankrolled out of one woman’s own pocket. By the time the inspector arrived, the strain had won. The infrastructure had slipped below what the ministry required to keep operating.

The inspector was not wrong. He was on duty.

But the consequence of him being right was that the only school within ten kilometres of seventy-seven orphans was about to close.

That is when Bitcoin Kampala stopped doing visits to Bugiri and started doing operations there.

The first move was a crowdfunding video. The same model that had put me on a plane to Prague — Geyser, Lightning, strangers — turned toward the school.

The phrase that came out of my mouth, walking around the unfinished campus on camera that month, was the same one we have been chasing ever since:

We need to paint this school Bitcoin. This is going to be the first model school in the world that uses Bitcoin. The goal is to convert this space to represent the hope that Bitcoin has given these children.

Then we put out the ask.

The MOU Years

We did not buy the school first. We signed an MOU.

For roughly the next year and a half, we administered Starlight while the original director kept ownership. That structure was deliberate. The school was not ours to acquire on day one. The community did not know us. The teachers had been there longer than we had been thinking about Bitcoin in Bugiri.

What we had to earn during those months was not a deed. It was the right to keep showing up.

So we showed up.

Teachers, paid in sats

Payday at Starlight moved to the 21st of each month.

The teachers — thirteen of them in June 2024 — agreed to begin receiving part of their salary in Bitcoin. We started small: about half of one month’s pay in sats, the rest in fiat. We set up Blink wallets. We gave each teacher a Lightning address. We sat with them while they sent their first transaction and the chime came back at them confirming the receive.

Some of those first sats went straight back out — to buy basic smartphones at around 62,000 sats per phone. Phones that opened wallets. Wallets that opened Lightning. Lightning that opened the rest.

The salary that month was not only money. It was the first time a teacher in rural Bugiri walked out of payday holding the rail.

You can teach a child about Bitcoin from a textbook. You cannot teach an adult what it means to be paid for their work in a money no one can confiscate without putting it in their pocket. That month we put it in their pockets.

Fruits for Sats moved to the school

Fruits for 10 sats had started on day one at the orphanage, with the bolt cards. Once we became Starlight’s administrator, the same demo moved from the orphanage premises to the school premises — and became the regular rhythm.

Same children. Same wallets. New courtyard.

It looked like a nutrition program from the outside. It was a literacy program on the inside. Wallets. Invoices. Custody. Confirmation times.

By the time we ran the next round of activations, the children had built a relationship with Bitcoin that did not go through theory. They had bought a banana with it.

A farm of our own, thanks to a donor in Hong Kong

A donor based in Hong Kong wanted to be sure the school always had food to fall back on. With his support we acquired farmland next to the school — not leased, owned.

We still harvest from it today. The most recent crop was beans.

The farm is not decoration. It is budget defence. Food on plates without waiting for the next round of cash donations to land.

The Honest Middle

I will not pretend this period was clean.

Bitcoin Kampala, Orphans of Uganda, Starlight Elementary, and my own legal name were four different things — and for stretches of those eighteen months, they got tangled in ways that were not always legible to the people closest to the work.

Land had to be protected before the institutional governance existed to hold it. Money flowed through wallets that some people could not see into the way they could see a paper receipt. Decisions that were defensive looked extractive from a different angle. Communication routed through third parties did not improve any of it.

We had built infrastructure. We had not yet built the governance around it.

Most of the corrections — separate finances, separate trustees, an MOU between school and orphanage, clear governance for the farmland and the school assets — came later. They came because the first round of mistakes had to be made first.

I would not redo that period. I would do it with the legal scaffolding already in place.

The Acquisition

In 2025 we acquired Starlight Elementary School. Property titles legally transferred. The school stopped being a project administered by outsiders and became an institution with a future the community could see.

The director who had bankrolled it alone for years got to hand it off to a system that would not disappear when she did.

That is the kind of exit that does not make news. It also does not make a single child miss a school year.

Four Buildings, Built in Sats

What came next was the hard, unphotographed part.

Four classroom blocks — A, B, C, D — went up in parallel. Block A was a new build from foundation up. The other three were existing structures comprehensively rebuilt: roofs sealed, floors tiled, walls plastered and sanded and undercoated and painted, doors and windows fitted, blackboards mounted, desks built and installed.

Every load of cement was paid for in Bitcoin.
Every box of tiles. Every can of paint. Every screw and every hinge.

Not as a slogan. As an operational rail. Bitcoin made the procurement traceable for donors and predictable for us — a single accounting layer underneath every receipt in a country where receipts can be slippery.

Older students from the orphanage — the high-schoolers — were paid in sats for their hours on site. They plastered. They sanded. They mixed. They carried. They watched older men they had known their whole lives accept the same kind of payment from the same kind of wallet they were learning to use.

That is the lesson. The lesson is not a Bitcoin pamphlet. The lesson is your cousin paid eight thousand sats for a day’s work and walked home with the receipt on his phone.

By 8 February 2026, all four buildings were handed over and the school reopened for active education.

Before and After

Two videos. A few minutes each. They compress everything above into something you can see.

The Muralist

After the construction came the storytelling.

We had put out an open call months earlier, recorded on camera at the school: “We’re looking for artists who can actually convert this space into something that can communicate the hope that Bitcoin has done for the students in this school.”

Dennis answered.

He moved onto the site and stayed. He worked alongside the older students who were already earning sats for their hours on the wall. The school’s outer perimeter and inner courtyards became a curriculum painted in colour.

Alphabet blocks. Numbers. Bitcoin Bs in the hills. The bubbles-girl portrait that anchors the long orange wall. A flower-anatomy mural that doubles as a biology lesson. A to-the-moon rocket any child in any country can read on sight. A We Are Safelock mural inside one of the blocks. The Trezor Academy mark on the branded perimeter wall — a permanent record, in paint, of who made this possible.

The walls do double duty now. They tell visitors what the school is. They teach the children what is on them.

Eggs for Sats. A Bus to the Zoo.

We added Eggs for Sats — children earning and spending sats for eggs, twice a week. Protein. Agency. A wallet entry per transaction.

Then we did Bitcoin Pizza Day.

A bus came to Bugiri. More than one hundred children got on it — many of them for the first bus ride of their lives. We drove to Entebbe Zoo. We saw animals most of them had only seen in books. We ate pizza. We celebrated a day that means nothing to most of the world and everything to the children who got to be in the world that day. Bitcoin Magazine later called it the biggest Bitcoin Pizza Day celebration ever held.

The bus mattered as much as the pizza.

You cannot calculate the unit economics of a first bus ride. You can only watch it land on a child who has never left their own district before, and you can decide whether the next round of donations should pay for another one. The answer is always another one.

The Funders

Starlight exists in the form it does because Bitcoiners on multiple continents stayed in the work past the first donation.

Bitcoin Beach has been the through-line. They have been with the project from the start — the largest single source of funding for the school’s purchase, the four buildings’ construction, and the painting that finished them. Beyond the capital, they have plugged us into a wider network of circular economy builders around the world and made sure our leadership team had mentors at every step. The mentorship has mattered as much as the money. We did not have to figure out, alone, how to run an institution like this.

Praia Bitcoin Brazil showed up in the person of its leader, Motolese. He was one of the people at the BTC Prague circular economies booth who told me to bring Bitcoin home in the first place. He has been with us from day one — across time zones, across continents, without fanfare.

Trezor Academy stayed in for the parts that don’t photograph well — the months of plaster, paint, and procurement when nothing dramatic is finished and you are just spending the previous month’s faith on the next pallet of materials. Their mark sits on the branded perimeter wall now, next to the school’s.

Geyser raised the first hard money for the school — and, before that, the money that got me to Prague in the first place. The same crowdfunding mechanism that paid for a single plane ticket in May 2023 has now contributed to a four-building campus. That symmetry is the whole story in one sentence.

I am not going to list every donor. They know who they are. The school is the receipt.

The Head Teacher Down the Road

The other thing that made Starlight a school and not just a building is a partnership with a neighbouring school called MST Junior School.

MST agreed to lend us their head teacher. He makes the trip to Starlight every two weeks. He mentors our head teacher. He rebuilds the school calendar. He brings the standards he runs MST on into rooms we are still settling into.

Our P7 students last year — the ones sitting their Primary Leaving Examinations — came out with grade 2 and grade 3 results. Five of them are now in high school. This year we are aiming for grade 1.

Bitcoin pays for the buildings. A head teacher down the road who shows up every fortnight is what turns a building into a school.

What’s Next, 2026

The plan from here is wide.

• I am relocating from Kampala to Jinja, an hour from Starlight. Mentoring works better when you live near the people you are mentoring.
• Jinja has a young Bitcoin community — Bitcoin Nile — that needs the same bootstrapping Bitcoin Kampala once needed. Showing up matters.
• Starlight is re-registering as a for-profit social enterprise so we can legally accept fiat donations and route them through a fiat-to-Bitcoin conversion. The school becomes a small engine that proves circular economies can interface with the legacy financial world without losing their shape.
• A structured volunteer program — international educators, professionals, activists invited to live on site and contribute their craft.
• An exchange program for our high-schoolers to volunteer at other circular economies — Afribit Kibera, Bitcoin Chama — and bring back what they learn.
• Hosting the Bitcoiners on the September Pan-African Tour at Starlight, so the world sees Bugiri.
• Sponsoring about twenty-five community members — leaders, children, teachers — to attend the Bitcoin Nairobi Conference in June.
• Finally bringing electricity and an ICT lab to the school. Computers. Internet. The next layer.
• A chapter on Bitcoin Kampala and Starlight in the forthcoming Bitcoin Circular Economies book by Ivan Kaleja and Gabriel Kurman.
• And another Bitcoin Pizza Day — this time at the Source of the Nile.

A Note on Why

I am an orphan. I lost my mother when I was young. I lost my father in 2023.

That is not why I started Bitcoin Kampala. But it is why I keep going back to Bugiri.

A child who has lost both parents does not need a charity. He needs a system that does not leave when the year ends. He needs adults who do not disappear. He needs an institution he can graduate from and look back at.

The school in Bugiri is, for a hundred and some children, that system.

It is not finished. It will never be finished in the sense that buildings finish — there will always be the next term, the next year, the next P7 cohort, the next inspector, the next bag of cement to buy. But it is standing. It is open. It is theirs.

And the money it stands on came from people I did not know, sent through a protocol I did not invent, into the bank account of a country that does not use it as a currency. That is the part of this story that should not be possible. That is the part that is most worth telling.

Coda — Thirty-Four People

The Geyser campaign that took me to Prague had thirty-four donors.

The same model now keeps a school alive for more than a hundred children.

If you backed the first campaign — you know who you are. If you backed any campaign since — you know who you are too. There is no Starlight without you.

The next time you see a one-line crowdfunding pitch from someone in a country you have never been to, asking for a few hundred dollars to do a thing that sounds small — it might not be small. It might be the beginning of a school.

* * *

A school built room by room. Paid for in sats. Taught from its walls. Standing where it stood. The only one in ten kilometres — and finally, the one the children walk into knowing it is theirs.

Contact: brindon@gorilla-sats.com | brindonmwiine.com