Rwandan Student Found Sanctuary in Dayton Catholic Schools
You never know where God will lead you. For Fanuel Uwishimwe, it was a journey from Kigali, Rwanda, to the football field at Carroll High School, from which he was graduated in May.
He made the journey from the East-Central African country to Dayton with family members in 2009 at the age of five. “My dad was already in the United States working, trying to make enough money for the rest of us to come here,” Uwishimwe explained.
Because he was so young at the time, his memories of life in Rwanda are limited, but his parents have shared stories about the ethnic strife, civil war, and genocide that ultimately left the country in shambles in 1994. “They’ve told me about alarms going off, barricading themselves in the house, trying to flee to another country, hoping things would get better,” he said. “We’re lucky to be here after all of that happened. If things had gone differently, my parents could have been killed.”