The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
RECIPIENT TELLS STUDENTS OF GIFT
‘Shoebox’ gifts changed lives of speaker, community after Rwandan Genocide
Yves Dushime was born into a family of eight in a refugee camp in Congo, Africa, after his family fled Rwanda to escape genocide.
He dealt with a lot of trauma as a child as his family would move from Congo, to Kenya and then in 1998 to Togo in West Africa.
He described himself as a very angry child filled with rage because of the way people treated them. He felt many treated them as if they were murderers once they found out the family was from Rwanda.
“We are from Rwanda. As you know Rwanda went through one of the worst things to ever happen to humanity – the Rwandan Genocide which took the lives of approximately a million people,” Dushime said.
“In that million people were my own family members, my grandmothers and grandfathers. I never met any of them.”
The surviving family members were treated like outsiders and as a result he came to feel like one.
Then the shoeboxes came when he was 11 and living in Togo.
Operation Christmas Child, a program sponsored by Samaritan’s Purse, sends gift-filled shoeboxes to children in need all over the world.
He recalls being handed a box that on top of the gifts inside it had a sticky note which said “God loves you, Jesus loves you and I love you.”
“I knew the first two things. I knew God loved me and Jesus loved me. My father’s a pastor and he taught me those two things always growing up,” Dushime said. “But that ‘I love you’ from a stranger, a member of that humanity that I despised so much who had sent me a box filled with gifts of things I desperately needed, was proof that they did indeed love me.”
Dushime shared this
story and message with the students at Cornerstone Christian Academy in Willoughby Hills when he spoke to them on Sept. 17.
That message was always be kind, be compassionate and be empathetic.
Dushime, now a spokesperson for Operation Christian Child and living in Buffalo, New York, travels to schools to speak to children about his life as a child in poverty and what the shoebox meant to him.
According to Dushime he and his family have built a life for themselves as a middle class family In Buffalo and he feels that life is great now, but it hasn’t always been that way.
“Every place we went we just dealt with a lot of poverty and a lot of this hopelessness,” Dushime said. “In the U.S., we deal with a different kind of poverty. I say this boldly, but many of the homeless people here are richer than some of the people I knew. Because here, even if you are homeless you still have so many opportunities for finding shelter or finding food where over there we’re all alone completely forgotten by the world.”
He attributes a person demonstrating that kind of love from across the world by sending him a shoebox to what led to him being able to let his anger start slipping away.
“All these things I had held onto all of sudden didn’t mean much,” Dushime said. “God used a box from a stranger somewhere to release me of that burden and teach me how to forgive on a daily basis.”
The 300 shoeboxes that were sent when Dushime received his had an impact on his community as well.
Families couldn’t afford to send all their kids to school so typically the boys went and the girls did not,
according to Dushime. The shoeboxes contained school supplies in addition to other gifts and the girls who received were able to start going to school.
“It doesn’t matter what religion you are, what race you are from, your background or your ethnicity, everyone can understand that there is something universal about the message these boxes carry, And that is that they give hope where there is no hope,” Dushime said.
“Those young girls never had any hope of going to school, they had abandon that thought. But, all of a sudden the whole thing changed when 300 boxes with so many school supplies all of a sudden arrived in one community and it allowed these girls to come to school”
According to Dushime the gift of that shoebox still impacts him to this day. It has helped him understand that people are not helpless
and can make a change in the world if they put they’re minds to it.
“People can change the lives of other people just by doing little things like shoeboxes,” Dushime said. “They can change someone’s perspective. You don’t have to feel paralyzed in our paths when we see hurt and hopelessness in the world, you can do something about it.”
Dushime hopes the children will go home and tell their parents to pack shoeboxes, but he also wants them to remember it’s about being kind.
“I want to leave you with one thing, the most important thing ever, and that is to be kind to one another,” Dushime told the students. “Just be kind to everyone you meet because whenever you start that at a young age it never leaves you.
“As a kid I could have used some kindness in my life, so as a kid be kind to one another in everything that you do.”
“It doesn’t matter what religion you are, what race you are from, your background or your ethnicity, everyone can understand that there is something universal about the message these boxes carry, And that is that they give hope where there is no hope.” — Yves Dushime, a former Rwandan refugee impacted by Operation Christmas Child shoebox gifts presented to his community