Hungry for Truth, Peace and Justice

August 23, 2009

Tracy Kidder is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author (The Soul of a New Machine, Mountains Beyond Mountains) whose latest book, Strength in What Remains, tells the extraordinary true story of a young man who grew up in the mountains of Burundi and survived a civil war and genocide before seeking a new life in America.

Deo and his family did not belong to the ruling group of Tutsis; they had no political connections and only his good grades and a high mark on the nationwide exam administered to sixth graders allowed him to be admitted to one of Burundi’s best high schools.

He boarded there, wore shoes for the first time and his world expanded. Once again, Deo’s exceptionally high grade on the national post-secondary school test resulted in a scholarship to a university in Belgium, to train for the priesthood. But Deo wanted to go to Burundi’s medical school instead.

When he arrived in Bujumbura for his first year of study, he owned only one shirt with a collar, which he washed at night and let dry in his open window. One pair of pants lasted his entire first year. Medical school was a paradise to Deo. Grades were posted and his name consistently appeared in the top five. He knew almost nothing of the deeply rooted divisions between Hutu and Tutsi tribes in his country.

Then in April 1994, Rwanda’s genocide began. Kidder advises that Burundi’s tragedy was less notorious but much more prolonged, continuing through the 1990s and into the new millennium.

It was the aftermath of 1988 massacres of Burundian Tutsis and counter-massacres of Hutus. Forced to run for his life from his dormitory as fellow students (Hutus) sought to kill him, Deo spent the next six months on the run, first from the eruption of violence in Burundi, then from the slaughter in Rwanda.

Kidder writes, “In his conscious mind, Deo was aware of being afraid, not of dying, but of dying the way his uncle the doctor had. Not that he wanted to die. Not that he wanted desperately to live. Survival simply had its own momentum. And to survive, it was clear, he had to get out of Rwanda.”

Improbable as it might seem, the fall of 1995 found Deo in New York entering his freshman year at Columbia University. How Deo survived is an inspiring, breathtaking story and the essence of this extraordinary book. For all the evil Deo escaped, he found kindness and compassion with strangers in New York who changed his life forever.