I grew up in Bethlehem, Free State — a small town where life was simple but never easy. At the age of 11 years old, I lost my mother. She was a nurse. Her salary was the heartbeat of our family. When she passed, that heartbeat stopped.

My father wasn't working at the time. Overnight, everything changed. The comfort we had known disappeared. But so did something else — the future that had been quietly planned for me.

Technology was a foreign concept growing up in Bethlehem. The closest thing we had to a digital device was a calculator. Computers existed — but barely. We learned about them at school, yet even our teachers were illiterate when it came to using them.

Nobody in my community spoke about software, coding, or digital careers. Those worlds belonged to other people — people from other places. Not us. Not Bethlehem.

And so we grew up without it. Unaware of what we were missing. Unaware of how much that gap would cost us later in life.

Then I met Muchaveleli. The woman who would become my wife. The M in LOM Life.

She was studying Software Engineering. I remember the moment I found out — I was genuinely shocked. Not just that such a course existed, but that the person I loved was living in a world I had never even known about.

I started learning more. About software. About the Fourth Industrial Revolution reshaping the world. And the more I learned, the more one thought kept returning:

That thought never left me. It became an itch. Then an urgency. Then a calling.

I won't pretend the journey has been easy. I started LOM Life with no tech background, no business degree, no connections, and no roadmap. I faced laziness. I faced anxiety. I faced self doubt. There were days I questioned everything.

But underneath all of that was a feeling I couldn't explain — a fire that just kept saying more. Do more. Be more. Build more.

So I started. Imperfectly. On a phone. With no qualifications. Just a name — LOM — and the three people it represents.

LOM Life PTY LTD exists because every child in every small town like Bethlehem deserves to know that technology is for them too. Every youth in every mining community deserves a pathway into the digital economy.

We bridge that gap. Through technology education, digital skills training, and entrepreneurship programs built specifically for mining communities — we are creating a generation of digitally literate, economically empowered South Africans.

This is not charity. This is a business built on purpose. And it carries the names of the people who made me who I am.