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Soccer Match: Boy Sends Balls, Goodwill to Rwanda

Soccer Match

Boy sends balls, goodwill to Rwanda
By Austin Bailey, World Ark senior editor

Photo by Geoff Oliver Bugbee

Building connections between children in the United States and post-genocide Rwanda isn’t as hard as it might seem. Twelve-year-old Sam Bunn figured out how to do it when he enlisted a Heifer International board member to tote a suitcase full of soccer balls as gifts for Rwandan children.

This cultural exchange came about because Heifer board member Julie Wilson happens to be the aunt of Cormac Martinez, Sam’s teammate on his soccer team in Laramie, Wyo. When Sam heard about Wilson’s trip to Rwanda last May, he decided to enlist Wilson to help him complete the service component of a six-week school project on genocide. Sam would collect the soccer balls; Wilson would haul as many of them as she could fit in her suitcase.

Sam immediately found out he would have to do some educating, since many of the people he approached for help weren’t familiar with what happened in Rwanda in 1994. “I had to do a lot of explaining because a lot of people didn’t even know what genocide was,” he said.

But once Sam explained, he got plenty of support. “A lot of people of all ages helped, even the university (of Wyoming) gave me some soccer balls. People from my soccer team and my school helped.” Sam collected 86 balls, which all had to be deflated for shipping. He packed them up along with patch kits and air pumps and got them to Wilson two days before her trip.

“I managed to squish about 50 balls into my largest suitcase,” Wilson said. “The suitcase tipped the scale just over the 50-pound limit, but the airline agent chose to ignore the infraction when she heard what was inside. The balls were distributed to delighted children in several villages where we visited, and at the Nyamata genocide memorial site, which was situated next to a large school whose lunch break happily coincided with our visit to the memorial.”

When she returned to the States, Wilson brought back a Rwandan soccer ball for Sam. “It was made out of leaves and string. It was jut crazy what they played with,” Sam said.

To read about Julie Wilson’s visit to Rwanda with fellow Heifer board members, go to www.heifer.org/worldark.