There’s a photo in the slide show that plays before Alex Nsengimana speaks that shows him a year or so ago, standing next to a slight man, half a head shorter and significantly thinner than the petite Nsengimana.
The smaller man wears a bright jumpsuit and stares at the camera.
He’s the man who killed Nsengimana’s grandmother on April 7, 1994. The man is a Hutu, who targeted Nsengimana’s Tutsi family during the Rwandan genocide that year.
“It wasn’t strangers who killed our grandmother,” Nsengimana said in the video narration. “It was our neighbors, who we knew by name.”
Nsengimana told more of that story, and of what preceded and followed, Friday morning at Living Stones Church on Alii Drive in Kailua-Kona. Now an ambassador for Operation Christmas Child, the 26-year-old who was adopted by a family in Minnesota at 15 spoke of forgiveness, answered prayers and realizing he was living a life of purpose.
“It’s a journey that I’m on every day,” Nsengimana told several dozen West Hawaii residents. “I tell that story to say how (God) heals me every day.”
Nsengimana is living his childhood dream. Prior to his presentation, he recalled how he would answer a question posed to children everywhere — what did he want to be when he grew up?
His response, from about the age of 9, never varied, he said. He wanted to be a pastor and travel the world to share the Gospel. A month ago, he fulfilled that dream, becoming a full-time staffer for Operation Christmas Child, which delivers shoe boxes packed with school supplies, toiletries, candy and toys to children around the globe.
He recounted in detail the box he received, when he was 7 and living in a Rwandan orphanage. The smells of certain candies, Smarties and candy canes, a specific brand of soap and other items he found in the box take him back to that moment. At the time, and at such a young age, he was angry, he said, and wondering why he was spared when nearly a million of his countrymen were killed.
Even before the genocide, Nsengimana’s life had been touched by tragedy. His mother was HIV positive and died when he was 4. To this day, he doesn’t know who his father was.
His grandmother took him and his siblings to raise them. He saw her tortured and killed, and about a week later, his uncle was also killed. He and his siblings ran way, trying to reach a city where his aunt lived. Once there, the family again decided to flee, heading to a refugee camp run by people who had come to Rwanda to end the genocide.
“Wherever the night would find us, that’s where we would sleep,” he said.
As a group of about 2,000 people were making that trip, Nsengimana said he was running and heard an odd noise. At the same time, he slipped on a pile of cow manure. The sound was a bullet, which buzzed just over his head.
“God used cow poop to save my life,” he said, grinning as a he told the story. “He works in mysterious ways. He works in powerful ways. He works in gross ways, too.”
Two more times, Nsengimana narrowly avoided death. Once, he was the backyard of his aunt’s home, when a man purchased beer the family sold at the front of the house, then sneaked to the back and aimed a weapon and the young Nsengimana. For some reason, the gun’s ammunition clip fell to the ground, and Nsengimana was spared. Later, after leaving the refugee camp, Nsengimana accompanied a relative to check to see if their home was still standing. The two were in the house, when Nsengimana begged his older relative to go outside to use the bathroom. Just after they left the house, some neighbors broke into the room they had just exited, intent on killing them.
When he was 9, he read a Bible verse that prompted him to become a Christian. At that moment, he said, he could no longer view all those incidents, from being spared from contracting HIV when he was born to surviving the genocide, as coincidences.
“I saw God’s presence in my life,” he said. “I could not ignore it anymore.”
Since its inception, Operation Christmas Child has delivered shoe boxes to 113 million children, Nsengimana said. His story is just one, and he encouraged people at the meeting to pack the present-filled boxes again this year.
Living Stones Church is the Kona drop-off site for the boxes. The organization has a national collection week Nov. 17 to 24. Collection times are 2 to 5 p.m. Nov. 17, 19 and 21, 9 a.m. to noon Nov. 18, 20, 22 and 24 and noon to 1 p.m. Nov. 23. Operation Christmas Child asks donors to provide $7 per box to cover shipping costs.
For more information about what to include in the boxes, visit samaritanspurse.org. People with questions may also contact West Hawaii Area Coordinator Cindy Eilerman at cynriccol@yahoo.com.