This teen wants to be Uganda's first MLB player. His coach and family are using TikTok to get him there.

GAYAZA, Uganda — Paul Wafula found Dennis Kasumba in a slaughterhouse.

By the time he was 14, hunger and hopelessness had led Kasumba to drop out of school and take a job slaughtering cows, sheep and goats. It was a Dickensian environment, one in which the workers, mostly young boys, were bathed in blood.

Wafula remembered of the pair's first conversation: "I asked him why he was working in the slaughterhouse and he was like, 'I want to have something to eat. We don't have anything to eat at home.' "

So Wafula, a volunteer baseball coach, made the boy a deal: leave the slaughterhouse and each time he came to the baseball field he'd get fed. When Kasumba became a regular, Wafula sweetened the deal: if he kept coming, the coach would pay for him to go back to school too.

And so began a relationship that would confirm Wafula's belief in the redemptive power of the sport and fill Kasumba, now 18, with dreams of becoming Uganda's first major leaguer.

Kasumba never knew his parents. His father, a soldier, went off to fight anti-government rebels in Uganda's civil war and never returned. So his mother abandoned her 2-month-old son and two elder siblings on her mother's doorstep and fled.

In Uganda, nearly 2.5 million children — one of every nine — is an orphan. For many, poverty and despair hang over them like a toxic cloud.

More than a half-dozen of the boys and girls on Wafula's sandlot team are orphans, which is why the coach uses baseball as a tool to teach larger lessons.

"I want to show them that the biggest challenge you're