The long road home

A young Tutsi fleeing genocide ends up on the streets of N.Y., goes to med school, and returns to start a clinic

August 23, 2009|Daniel Akst, Globe Correspondent

On Oct. 22, 1993, a sensitive young Burundian medical student working at a rural hospital was surprised to discover at the start of his shift that most of the staff had vanished. He soon learned the reason: The nation’s president, a Hutu, had been assassinated, and all over the country Hutus were killing Tutsis.

The young Tutsi intern, who until middle school didn’t know the difference between Hutus and Tutsis, got trapped at the hospital and is alive today because he hid under his bed but forgot to close the door to his room. From this the murderers concluded that he’d fled - which he did accomplish after they left. Unfortunately, his troubles were only beginning. In a nightmarish flight to safety through a landscape of horrors, he followed a river whose “shallow waters seemed all but dammed with bodies, and the valley was littered with them, the corpses and feasting dogs thickening as he approached Kibimba.’’

Many Americans don’t know it, but Rwanda wasn’t the only place where Hutus launched a kind of people’s genocide, one carried out not as part of a military campaign but by ordinary citizens wielding machetes. There was mass murder aplenty in neighboring Burundi as well, its historical roots extending even beyond the curse of colonialism.

Yet the man known only as Deogratias in Tracy Kidder’s heart-rending new book - the author withheld his surname because Burundi remains dangerous - didn’t only survive. He found his way to New York, lived for awhile in Central Park, delivered groceries 12 hours a day for far-below minimum wage, learned English, and somehow overcame his searing memories to graduate from Columbia University and make his way to Dartmouth Medical School. Then he went home and started a clinic.

Kidder’s account of Deo’s life, “Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness,’’ appears to grow out of his earlier book “Mountains Beyond Mountains,’’ about Paul Farmer, a Harvard physician and Third World health crusader. Deo worked for awhile at Partners in Health, an international medical organization that Farmer helped start, and Kidder tells Deo’s story with characteristic skill and sensitivity in a complex narrative that moves back and forth through time to build a richly layered portrait.

Deo emerges as a wounded but irrepressible figure determined despite the risks to go back and help his people. Like so many survivors, Deo seems to walk a tightrope between remembering and forgetting. He comes from a culture whose poverty, sickness and other chronic troubles breed stoicism, and gusimbura - reminding someone of something bad - is a serious social error. Burundian elders would say, “When too much is too much or too bad is too bad, we laugh as if it was too good.’’