MEET THE
FOUNDER
After spending 14 years growing up in East Africa, Nathanael Lindquist found a way to give back to the amazing communities who raised him.
This is his story.
I grew up playing soccer on the streets and fields of Uganda. In a country that does not have much, soccer is one of the few places where people can come together and forget about the hardships of life. It is more than a sport, it’s a joy of life.
Soccer was the only real way for me to make friends. I didn’t speak the language, my skin color caused me to stick out more than I would have liked, and the culture was something I had never experienced. But when we stepped on the soccer field, none of that mattered anymore.
We were just kids having fun. My brother and I would spend four to five hours a day playing soccer with the local kids of Entebbe. No one had shoes to wear, so we all played barefoot. We would use two bricks as goalposts, and would play until the sun set. When it got dark, we would take our motorcycle home, feet bruised and blackened from the dark soil we played on. This was my life, and soccer very quickly became something I knew would be apart of the rest of my life.
Pictured: Nathanael at age six, alongside his former teammate, Sseboa. (Entebbe, Uganda).
“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.”
Romans 8:28
After completing high school in Kenya, I continued my soccer career at Azusa Pacific University, where I initially got the idea for a soccer academy.
I was sitting in a business marketing class, having been praying for a new idea to start working on. Right in the middle of class, this vision of building a soccer academy just came to me out of the blue, and immediately I started writing down page after page of notes on what this idea should look like. I had no name for it, and no finances to run it. But I knew that this was what God put me on earth to do. And it’s just the beginning.
Uganda has always been my home. Even when I came back to the US for college, I knew that I wanted to eventually go back to Africa. In a continent with so much beauty and talent, it’s a shame to see how so much of it gets unseen due to the serious lack of opportunity in many of these countries. I started MUNGU, as a way to help out those people and communities that brought me up in Uganda, and helped me get the place in life where I am now. MUNGU’s aim is to get opportunities for young athletes to play soccer across the world and make an income to bring back to their families and communities, and in turn continue to pay-it-forward and keep spreading the love of God.
