Clean water, electricity and plumbing were luxuries that were nonexistent in Thomas Awiapo’s childhood. In fact, he didn’t know what they were until his adulthood.

Hospitals and doctors were rare commodities.

“I never even knew what a toothbrush was,” Awiapo said when he spoke at Paul VI Catholic High School in Fairfax recently. He told the students that he would take a twig from a tree and chew on it to clean his teeth. “My dentist was the tree,” he joked.

By the time he was 10, both of his parents had died and he and his three brothers were left orphaned. “We were always hungry. We cried for food. We fought for food,” said Awiapo.

Two of his brothers died of starvation and his older brother went in search for food, never to return. “I was alone in that village,” said Awiapo, who was “rescued” by Catholic Relief Services (CRS).

Now he jokes about how CRS “tricked me to go to school.” The CRS-sponsored school provided snacks and lunches every day, which lured the empty-bellied orphan to get an education.

“Hunger drove me to that school,” he said. Children were willing to walk five miles each way to and from school to sate their appetites.

After snack, “the teachers took me hostage and I was sentenced to another class.”

All humor aside, he said “that little snack changed my whole life.”

Despite the hardships and trials, he has a lot to be thankful for, he told the students.

Now married with two sons and a daughter, Awiapo lives in Ghana and works as the senior program officer with CRS.

“Education is so important,” said Awiapo, referring to it as a “tool that can end poverty.”

Awiapo gave three presentations to all the religion classes in the school’s auditorium.

Every year he travels to the United States during Lent and goes around the country talking to students about staying focused on school, learning to share their blessings with others, and raising awareness of the work of CRS and the Operation Rice Bowl project, a fund-raising program that provides relief projects overseas and coordinates efforts to alleviate hunger and poverty in the United States.

“You have a different situation,” Awiapo told the attentive teens. “You are blessed with a wonderful country, a country of plenty, a country of abundance. You are so blessed and have decided to share.”

The generosity of CRS, he said, “made me who I am.”

According to Awiapo, last year CRS collected $10 million through Operation Rice Bowl. “That money has brought so much joy and hope for so many children around the world,” he said.

Awiapo attended the University of Ghana and later received a grant and scholarship from CRS to attend California State University at Hayward.

An academic education, however, was not the only thing for which Awiapo is grateful — he also has his faith, he said.

“I was not a Catholic or even a Christian.” While walking to school in his make-shift cardboard shoes to protect his feet from the scorching heat, he met an American priest who gave him a pair of shoes. “It was the happiest day,” Awiapo remembered. Later, after receiving a shirt and pants from the same priest, Awiapo began going to the mission, where he learned the catechism and was eventually baptized.

While learning about the Faith, he became angry at God for taking away his parents, but then realized that “God put great people of great will into my life,” he said about the help he received. It was “God through these people.

“People who had nothing to do with me, made me who I am. People fed me and clothed me. … Today I stand here because of that,” he said.

That witness and love impels him to “go and do the same to others.”

His love for his faith inspired him to discern the priesthood, and he was in the seminary for six years only to discover that God was not calling him to serve as a priest.

Awiapo is serving God in a different way. “Faith is what drives me to do what I do ... My faith is what keeps me going.”

Now, he “tricks more children to go to school.” Many parents in the villages in Ghana would prefer that their children go out and work in the fields or on the farm rather than go to school, which to them is a “waste.” According to CRS, nearly half of all Ghanaians are illiterate. However, there has been an increase in school attendance because of the enticement of receiving a hot meal.

Awiapo talks to the parents and encourages them to send their children to school.

“My life, my joy is going to these villages,” he said. “I think it’s a call, a vocation, a mission from God.”

Although he had the opportunity to stay in the United States after his graduate studies in California, he said, “The skills I’ve acquired here are more useful in my village, in my community.”

He still lives in a village without electricity, he said, adding with a smile, “We have the moonlight and the moonlight can be so bright.”

Awiapo reminded the students of their blessings. At times up to 10 school children in Ghana share one textbook, he said.

“God blessed this country for a reason,” he said, urging the students to “be a source of blessing for others.”

In America, people have big hearts, but some of them “have no idea what to do,” said Awiapo, after the talk.

Many of the kids in the United States “have never been exposed to the different side of the world.” By visiting schools and talking to the students across the nation, he tries to be a living witness and offer testimony. By his presence, he said “poverty becomes close.” Hopefully, he said, the students are moved to share these blessings.

How to help

For information about Operation Rice Bowl or Catholic Relief Services go to crs.org.