College Chapel
Defining Moments: Carl Wilkens, Director of “World Outside my Shoes”
Thursday, Oct. 28, 9:50 a.m. – 10:20 a.m.
Whitley Auditorium
Music: Professor Whitaker’s Saxophone Quartet
Join us this Thursday in Whitley Auditorium for College Chapel. We will continue to hear from speakers about how events in their lives have helped to define who they now are. We will be challenged to consider how past events – personal and public, positive and negative – have shaped and molded our present realities.
About College Chapel
Thursday Chapel is a time and space to take a break from the busyness of the week and refresh the spirit. It is not a “worship service,” rather a time of reflection offered by a member of the Elon community or guest speaker. Music is provided each week by students and faculty from the Music department. Refreshments will be served following Chapel. All are welcome!
About the Speaker
As a humanitarian aid worker, Carl Wilkens moved his young family to Rwanda in the spring of 1990. When the genocide was launched in April 1994, Carl refused to leave, even when urged to do so by close friends, his church and the United States government. Thousands of expatriates evacuated and the United Nations pulled out most of its troops. Carl was the only American to remain in the country. Venturing out each day into streets crackling with mortars and gunfire, he worked his way through roadblocks of angry, bloodstained soldiers and civilians armed with machetes and assault rifles in order to bring food, water and medicine to groups of orphans trapped around the city. His actions saved the lives of hundreds.
Carl returned to the United States in 1996. After being featured in the 2004 PBS Frontline documentary, “Ghosts of Rwanda”, about the Rwanda genocide, he began to receive letters, phone calls and offers from teachers around the country to come and share his experiences with students.
In January 2008, with no end in sight to the ongoing genocide in Darfur, Sudan, Carl decided quit his job and dedicate himself full time to accepting these invitations. He and his wife Teresa have since formed an educational nonprofit, World Outside My Shoes, to facilitate this important work.