A young Ontario man's charity work in Uganda is helping to shine a spotlight on the plight of street kids in the East African country.

Robbie Palmer, 21, is the co-founder of Kwagala Ministries, a local orphanage in Jinja in southeastern Uganda, which houses 10 boys, ages six to 14. Palmer, who established the community-based housing project with his friend Raoul Mugosa last year, recently returned to Uganda for a surprise visit.

His reunion with the group of ecstatic boys was captured on video that was then posted to user-content driven website Reddit where it was voted "up" more than 1,700 times.

As of Tuesday morning, the video had been viewed more than 98,000 times on YouTube.

Palmer, who is from Kanata, Ontario, said he decided to travel to Uganda last October to "see what kind of difference" he could make.

During his first month in the impoverished African country, Palmer said he met a lot of children living on the street because their parents either died, or did not have the resources to care for them.

"Anytime I would go into town, there would be lots of kids who are homeless and they would come running up to you," Palmer told CTV's Canada AM on Tuesday from Jinja, Uganda. "I started building a relationship with some of them."

Palmer said the experience made him think how he could make a difference.

"That got me thinking about what kind of difference I could make and reverse the question: Why do we humans let this happen?"

A month later, Palmer and Mugosa, who he was living with at the time, approached the Uganda government and registered Kwagala Ministries as an official non-profit organization.

Kwagala, which means "love" in Luganda -- one of the most common spoken languages in Uganda -- took in its first orphan in February of this year.

"We took our first child into our home. His name is Emma, six year old(sic), from Masese, one of the poorest slums in Uganda," reads a post on the Kwagala Ministries website.

"He has been on and off the streets the last few years. His mother passed away and his father is drunk almost 24/7 and doesn't care about or for him."

Uganda is considered one of the poorest countries the world, with approximately 38 per cent of its population living on less than US $1.25 a day, according to the World Bank.

"There definitely is just a lack of physical things (but) that doesn't make a difference in their attitude," Palmer said. "Some of these Uganda people are the happiest people I know which is amazing given the little that they have."

Donations to Kwagala Ministries can be made here: http://www.kwagalaministries.com/donate