18/05/2026
Reading this made me cry so, always curious, I looked up Ryan Hrelja’s date of birth and he is a great example of a Life Path 11/2 master number. His date of birth adds up all 3 different ways to 11 - this is quite rare and in my opinion, an example of someone on Earth who is very likely to step up to the higher vibration of the master number, with all its intensity, trials and challenges.
Part of a true master number’s life purpose is to raise the consciousness of those on earth and teach others to raise their vibration through their passionate interests. A fabulous read ⬇️
https://www.facebook.com/share/1KVWunz4Pw/?mibextid=wwXIfr
In July of 2000, a boy in the back of a truck approaching Angolo Primary School in northern Uganda saw five thousand people lining the road. They had walked from villages around the school and were waiting to greet him. Four children ran alongside the truck, shouting his name. The boy in the back of the truck was nine years old. He was Canadian. He had never been to Uganda before. He had never been outside North America before. The five thousand people on the road were waiting for him because two years earlier, when he was six, he had decided to earn seventy dollars doing chores.
The boy in the back of the truck was Ryan Hreljac. He had grown up in Kemptville, Ontario, a small town near Ottawa. He had been six years old, in the third week of January 1998, when his first-grade teacher Nancy Prest had stood at the front of the classroom at Holy Cross School and explained to twenty-three children sitting cross-legged on the carpet that in some parts of the world children walked five kilometers every morning to collect water, that the water when they got to it was often contaminated, and that hundreds of thousands of those children died every year of waterborne disease.
Most of the twenty-three children had been doing the kinds of things six-year-olds do at carpet-time. Ryan had been listening.
He had raised his hand and asked how far the children in Africa had to walk for water. Mrs. Prest had said five kilometers, or about five thousand steps. He had raised his hand again and asked how much it cost to fix the problem. Mrs. Prest had named an organization called WaterCan that drilled wells and had said, approximately, that it cost about seventy dollars.
Ryan had thought about the water fountain in the hallway outside his classroom. The fountain was ten steps from where he was sitting. He had counted them. Ten steps versus five thousand steps. Cold clean water versus contaminated water that killed people.
He had gone home that afternoon and informed his mother, Susan, that he needed to earn seventy dollars.
Susan, who was making dinner, had assumed this was the sort of thing six-year-old children announce in kitchens and then forget by the weekend. She had given him a list of household chores and the rate she would pay for each. A dollar here, two dollars there.
Ryan had done every chore on the list. He had done them every day. He had done them for four months.
In April of 1998, he had walked into the kitchen and handed his mother a Ziploc bag containing seventy dollars in small bills and coins. He had counted it himself.
Susan called WaterCan to ask about the next step.
The next step, she learned on that call, was a problem. Seventy dollars would buy a hand pump for a well, not a well. The actual cost of drilling a well in Uganda in 1998, with the necessary equipment, was approximately two thousand dollars.
She hung up the phone and looked at her son, who was waiting in the kitchen with the Ziploc bag in his hand and the conviction that his life's first major problem had just been solved.
She told him the truth.
Ryan thought about it for what she remembered as a short interval. Then he said, in the voice of a six-year-old who had already done the math: Then I will just do more chores.
He meant it. He went back to the vacuum and the windows and the yard. But two thousand dollars at a dollar a chore was not a feasible solo project. He needed help. He started asking for it.
He asked his principal whether he could speak to the other classes at Holy Cross School. The principal agreed. He asked his parents whether he could speak to local church groups and service clubs. They agreed. By the late spring of 1998, Ryan Hreljac, age six, was standing at the front of rooms full of adults explaining that children in Africa were dying of waterborne illness and that he was raising money to drill them a well.
He was, by every adult description of the period, impossible to refuse. He had counted the steps to the water fountain in his school hallway. He had done the arithmetic of comparison out loud, in his small clear voice, in front of grown men. Ten steps. Five thousand steps. The injustice he was describing was specific. It was solvable.
The donations began.
A letter arrived at Holy Cross School addressed simply Ryan's Well, Kemptville, Ontario. It contained a twenty-five-dollar check and a note saying the writer wished she could do more. Other letters followed. A local well-drilling company saw Ryan's story on a local television broadcast and sent twenty-seven hundred dollars in a single envelope.
By the summer of 1998, Ryan had raised the two thousand dollars he needed for one well. By the end of 1998 he had raised seven thousand.
WaterCan partnered with the Canadian Physicians for Aid and Relief, who arranged for a well to be drilled beside Angolo Primary School in northern Uganda. The well opened in January of 1999. Ryan was seven years old.
His second-grade teacher that fall, Lynn Dillabaugh, watched what was happening and decided to extend it. She arranged a pen-pal program between the children at Ryan's school and the children at Angolo Primary School. Ryan's assigned pen pal was a boy named Jimmy Akana.
Jimmy wrote letters describing what his life had been like before the well. He had been waking, on most days, at midnight, to walk eight kilometers to the nearest water source, fill containers, and walk eight kilometers back. He had done this several times a night. He had done it before school began in the morning.
Ryan read those letters and understood, in a way that no statistic in his classroom could have made him understand, what a well was for. A well was not water. A well was the years of a child's life that the absence of water had been taking.
In July of 2000, Ryan flew to Uganda with his family to see the well at Angolo Primary School. He was nine years old.
The truck approached the school. Four children ran out to meet it. Behind them, around the bend, were the five thousand people.
The village elders met him formally. They gave him a goat. An elder addressed the assembled crowd, looking around the gathered children of his village, and said that the children were healthy now, that they were standing in front of them today, because of Ryan and his friends in Canada. For us, the elder said, water is life.
Ryan met Jimmy that day, for the first time. They stood together on the road, two boys of about the same age, one from Kemptville and one from northern Uganda, linked by letters and by a single drilled hole in the ground that had transferred years of life from one of their childhoods to the other.
The foundation Ryan's family helped him formalize in 2001, when he was ten years old, was first called Ryan's Well Foundation. By 2003 it had raised over a million Canadian dollars and drilled more than one hundred and twenty wells across Africa. The Canadian International Development Agency began matching his fundraising at a two-to-one rate. By 2015 the foundation had completed nine hundred water projects serving over eight hundred thousand people. By the early months of 2025, it had completed more than eighteen hundred water projects and thirteen hundred sanitation projects in seventeen countries, serving approximately one point six million people.
The work had also expanded beyond drilling. The foundation taught communities to maintain the wells, manage their water resources, and build sanitation systems alongside the water access.
Jimmy Akana, meanwhile, had a more complicated decade than Ryan did. During the long civil war in northern Uganda, the Lord's Resistance Army abducted Jimmy. He escaped. He made his way back to safety. Ryan's family, who had remained in contact with him through the foundation's work in his region, helped him eventually relocate to Canada. In 2007, Jimmy Akana became a Canadian citizen and was officially adopted by Ryan's family.
The two pen-pal boys from the carpet of grade two and the village outside Angolo Primary School had become brothers.
Ryan received the Order of Ontario as the youngest person ever to be awarded it. He received the World of Children Award. The Canadian Meritorious Service Medal. The Nelson Mandela Humanitarian Award. He spoke at schools and conferences in Canada, the United States, Australia, South Africa, China, Japan, and Italy. He studied international development and political science at the University of King's College in Halifax.
He is thirty-three years old in 2026. He has been running his foundation, in some form, since he was ten. The first-grade classroom in Kemptville was twenty-eight years ago.
When he speaks to schoolchildren now, he ends his talks with a question. He does not tell them that everyone has to start a global charity at the age of six. He does not tell them they have to dedicate their lives to water. He tells them, instead, to find out where their own puzzle piece fits in the world. For him, it had turned out to be water. For somebody else in the room he was talking to, it might be something else entirely. The question was not what. The question was where.
The five thousand people on the road outside Angolo Primary School, in July of 2000, had not been gathered because a great philanthropist or a great institution had come to their village. They had been gathered because a nine-year-old boy from Ontario had counted ten steps to a water fountain in his school hallway, had subtracted them from five thousand, and had refused to accept that the difference was acceptable.
His piece, it turned out, had fit in the world.
It had been a small piece.
It had been load-bearing.
