Business owners donate gifts to refugees in Ghana

Games, art supplies and more came from Jewish holiday collection drive

The Jewish Community Center collects donations for its annual Day of Service on Dec. 25 and distributes the gifts to local homeless shelters, and transitional and senior centers, JCC spokeswoman Erica Steen said.

Steen said the center usually receives about 6,000 gifts each year and ends up with about 3 percent to 5 percent left over after exhausting all of its resources. For the past two years, the JCC has called on 1-800-GOT-JUNK? to collect the surplus gifts and donate them elsewhere.

The Rubins recently met Patricia Gick, an advocate from Pennsylvania, who helped connect them with the refugee camp.

The gifts were simple, not battery-operated, and allow the refugees to pass the time, Mark Rubin said.

‘‘Passing the time is sort of the thing [that’s important] because not a lot of aid or excitement is coming their way,” he said.

Gick, who visited the refugee camp with the advocacy organization Global Citizens Journey last summer, said there are more than 1,400 people in the camp and 400 of them are children.

‘‘The people in the camp are child soldiers from Rwanda, displaced families of Sierra Leone because of blood diamonds and those who walked to Ghana from Darfur,” Gick said. ‘‘One cannot witness such a thing and not be changed.”

Gick said the average stay in a camp is six years.

Rubin said they hoped that having the gifts would help create a community among the refugees at the camp who might not have anything interactive to do otherwise.

And the donation of gifts was only the beginning.

The Rubins also collected laptop computers from friends and donated those to create an Internet area for the refugees.

Rubin said he plans to organize a broader ‘‘energy-efficient entrepreneurial philanthropy” in the months to come. He did not specify what that would entail, but said the purpose is to ‘‘enable people in communities to be more efficient and have better lives.”

‘‘I plan to make a group of thousands of entrepreneurs... and get them involved in solving problems in other countries,” he said.

Gick said the gifts mean a lot to those in the camps, especially the children.

‘‘They’re making a connection with the kids in the refugee camp and orphanages, and now kids are sharing and caring for other children through things being sent,” Gick said. ‘‘There are 400 kids in the camp and they don’t have access to school, so the only hope they have is the connection we’re making for them.”