Gakenke, shoe boxes and Advent thoughts

Last week I visited my last parish of the 13 in the diocese in order to start our welfare programme there. Gakenke is in the forest, 2.5 hours away from our base in Kamembe and is another of the parishes without electricity, running water or even a market, but there is a church there with a pastor’s house and 4 partly-built daughter churches in the surrounding hills. I was probably the first white visitor in many months.
One of the jobs was to distribute gifts from Christmas shoe boxes. I have been involved with shoe box appeals before – collecting, donating and packing - and I know lots of other people who have, too, so I have absolutely no objection in principle. The basic idea of packing a shoe box with suitable gifts for a child breaks down here, however. There are simply too many children. In the end this project was just the wrong thing to be doing in rural Rwanda.
Cyangugu Diocese had received 50 boxes each containing around 6 shoe boxes. This was our share of a container load of boxes delivered to Rwanda for the Anglican church. “Fairness” meant that each diocese had to receive an equal share : the same principle resulted in each parish getting 4 boxes. Unfortunately, Gakenke alone had more than 100 children from the various churches, so the boxes had to be opened and the contents divided.
The first step was to remove anything which looked edible but wasn’t – Playdo being a prime target. These gifts would quickly end up in the hands of children who were too young or just unable to read English.
Stage two was to break up the packets of crayons, coloured pencils and sweets and to remove any excess packaging. There was now a great heap of gifts at the front of the church and an even bigger heap of wrapping.
Finally, the distribution began and as usual the children waited patiently in turn. I don’t know if those at the end of the line expected to get much less than those at the head of the queue, but that is what happened.
So, after my visit to Gakenke, my reasons for hating shoeboxes are as follows :
1. It creates a huge amount of work in order to distribute. We never asked for it and if we sat down and thought rationally about the costs and benefits, we would have burned the lot, but once the stuff has arrived, it is inevitably going to have to be shared “equally”.
2. Many of the gifts arriving here were quite inappropriate. Even yoyos and jigsaws potentially good toys, are useless without instructions.
3. The children do not understand why they are getting gifts or from whom. I had a terrible thought in the middle of the morning – “they must think that I have organised this!”
4. It is divisive – there were as many kids excluded from the distribution as were admitted and those outside were even more scruffy than those inside.
5. It creates a lot of litter. Outside the church was littered with Christmas wrapping and discarded jigsaw pieces.

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I had real pangs of sadness as the end of the distribution came to an end. This whole episode throws some disturbing light on the human condition. How often our hearts are set on the wrong things! How easily we are pleased with a few pathetic possessions! How incompetent and misdirected even our best-intentioned actions can be!
How little all of this has to do with the celebration of God coming into the world to live as one of us – but it shows why we need saved and why he needed to come.