Seventeen years ago in Rwanda, longtime CNN producer Ingrid Formanek met someone who would change her life: Patrick Mbarushimana, a six-year-old orphan named who had lost both of his arms as punishment by his own father. Formanek, touched by the little boy’s spirit in the face of “ultimate cruelty,” became Mbarushimana’s guardian and has given him financial support ever since.
Mbarushimana, now 23 and an aspiring rapper, recently came to Boston to be fitted for prosthetic arms. “I am who I am because of them,” he says of Formanek and his adopted father. Watch:
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