From staff reports
TRUSSVILLE – On Friday, July 24 the Trussville Public Library will host a speaker who is affiliated with Operation Christmas Child – an organization that specializes in providing underprivileged kids with gifts.
Alex Nsengimana once received an Operation Christmas Child shoebox as an orphan in Rwanda before becoming a spokesman for the company. submitted photo.
The guest speaker, Alex Nsengimana, will address roughly 30 children at the library for one hour. He is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m.
Nsengimana, a native of Rwanda, was a recipient of one of Operation Christmas Child’s gift-filled shoeboxes when he was a kid. The simple box, filled with toys, school supplies and hygiene items, has since changed his life.
Soon after opening his box, Nsengimana became a member of the African Children’s Choir and began touring in the U.S. He recently graduated from a bible college in Minnesota, according to a press release.
He aspires to return to Rwanda in efforts to upstart a church in his hometown. Nsengimana hopes to spread Christianity through the people of Rwanda.
Before reaching the age of ten, Nsengimana lost his young mother to HIV/AIDS before witnessing his uncle and grandmother being murdered in the midst of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Following the tragedy, he and his siblings were forced to run.
They eventually found an orphanage to call “home” for the next several years. A year after arriving at the orphanage, he and his peers received the surprise Operation Christmas Child boxes.
In 2013, Nsengimana returned to his native country as a representative for Operation Christmas Child. He was able to deliver shoebox gifts to children in the same orphanage he ran to as a child.
He then visited the man who killed his uncle and grandmother several years earlier. He confronted the man in a local jail and offered him forgiveness and prayer.
