{UAH} Raising the fear of Rwandans like Allan Barigye to our country is not a gimmick part two

Horror of Rwanda genocide, beauty of Lake Victoria ‘life changing’

Catholic education provided tools to recognize larger hand at play: Robbins

Paul Forsyth

Niagara This Week - Welland

Friday, May 6, 2016

NIAGARA — Rob Robbins saw horrors that no man should have to see, but the images of war and genocide that he witnessed didn’t tear down his faith.

In fact, they strengthened his beliefs fostered by a Catholic education.

Robbins, of St. Catharines, was one of nine recipients of the 2016 Distinguished Alumni Awards presented by the Niagara Catholic District School Board at its fourth annual awards on Friday.

He had his first life-altering experience shortly after graduating from Saint Paul Catholic High School in Niagara Falls, when a drunk driver slammed into his car head-on, smashing his body and nearly killing him. Doctors told him he would never walk again.

Robbins, a sound engineer, pushed himself in rehab, first floating in pools, then fighting his way into a wheelchair and then using a cane. Three months later, he was back at work with evangelist Franklin Graham, heading to some of the most dangerous places in Africa for humanitarian work.

Along with being shot at in a civil war in the Congo, Robbins was flying in a small Cessna to a vast refugee camp in Tanzania where 650,000 Rwandans had fled the horrors of that country’s genocide in which 400,000 people were butchered in 1994.

He remembers being transfixed by the sight of Mount Kilimanjaro and vast Lake Victoria.

“I remember being in the co-pilot’s seat and I was just frozen,” he said. “I was looking at how beautiful it was.”

When Robbins saw large green, floating patches that looked like giant lily pads, he asked the pilot what it was.

“The pilot turned pale white and he said, ‘those are bodies,’ ” said Robbins.

They were of thousands of Rwandan genocide victims who’d been dumped by their killers into a river in that country and washed into Lake Victoria, where the currents clumped them together.

Robbins said his Catholic education helped him not give in to despair at that sight. “To go from those two contrasts, from such sheer beauty to such absolute horror was life-changing for sure,” he said. He found his faith was even stronger.

“Catholic education gave me the tools to realize that there’s a larger hand at play, that I won’t ever understand all the bad things that happen in the world, but at least I know God has a planned purpose for each and every one of us,” he said.

Dr. Jennifer Frendo, a Niagara-on-the-Lake family doctor who graduated from Denis Morris Catholic High School in St. Catharines and who was also  a distinguished alumni award winner, travels to the African nation of Guyana four to six times a year in partnership with two colleagues, donating medical expertise, surgical assistance and supplies, and assisting in surgeries that allow patients with end-stage renal failure to receive dialysis treatments.

She said she takes the fundamental Catholic beliefs of loving others and doing unto others as you’d have done unto yourself literally, and credits her teachers with instilling that in her.

“My teachers didn’t just teach us verbally that this is what we should be doing,” she said. “They led by example.”

Fellow alumni award winner Christina Le Rose of Niagara Falls, a Saint Paul graduate who is an award-winning classical pianist, said her school taught her to use her gift for good.

“I was taught to use music to touch and enrich the lives of others by performing at churches, hospitals, retirement residences and charitable functions,” she said.

Le Rose continues to organize charitable benefits while advancing the importance of the arts in education through teaching at Brock University.

Father James Mulligan, an alumni award winner and graduate of Notre Dame College School in Welland who returned to his alma mater as teacher and head of the school’s religion department, spearheaded the school’s annual pilgrimage that’s been adopted by other Catholic schools in the region and which have raised millions of dollars to support development projects around the world.

He said Catholic education teaches students that God is at home through all of creation, and that people must be better stewards of creation while making the world more fair and just.

“That can be environmental, it can be in areas of justice, it can be in areas of peace, in the unequal distribution of the world’s wealth,” he said. “Faith has a whole lot to do with that.”

Robbins said his Catholic education made him want to do things that affect change in the world.

“You look at things differently,” he said. “It prepares you in ways that you carry through the rest of your life.”

Other 2016 distinguished alumni included WIND mobile founder Anthony Lacavera, intellectual property lawyer Catherine Lacavera, Lakeview Vineyard owner Joseph Pillitteri, Canadian Football League Grey Cup winner Hector Pothier, and Hernder Estate Winery winemaker Lydia Tomek.

Paul Forsyth is a veteran of more than 30 years of community journalism who covers a wide range of issues in Niagara Falls and other parts of south Niagara, as well as topics of regional significance in Niagara.

EM         -> {   Gap   at   46  } – {Allan Barigye is a Rwandan predator}

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