Our founder had been to Bwindi a couple of times before, yet felt the need to return. The forest was calling to him. He desired to walk through its thicket, following the narrow footpaths, unable to see far beyond the greenness, reliving a moment that never gets old or tiring and feels like the first time, every time.

He planned to set up a development, something different from the lodges within the area. During these walks, as he thought of it, he encountered something unexpected. One expects to see a gorilla or two, but never two boys, more so boys who aren’t tourists. The two boys were Mugisa and Nguru.

The two teenagers stared at him before disappearing into the trees. He considered that he might have hallucinated them. But as he returned to the lodge where he was staying, he found the boys standing across from a woman carrying a bundle of firewood on her head. With a raised voice, she spoke to them as they stood quietly, their eyes on the ground. Despite not understanding their language, he could tell the mother was reprimanding her children. A man who chimed in explained that the boys’ crime was trespassing into the forest, which was prohibited without permission from Uganda Wildlife Authority officials.
A conversation between the mother and the founder, through the man who translated, revealed that she was a farmer but still had to trek to nearby villages to sell her produce. Her sons had never been to school or received any kind of skills training. She wished she could sell their produce to the nearby lodges and earn money to send her sons for vocational training.

The villa came to his mind, but different. What if there was a destination in Bwindi that trained the local community in skills, employed some, while others graduated and qualified for employment elsewhere? He imagined a place where all this could be possible: tourism, private luxury, community development, and conservation.
That place is The Mistwood Villa.