because I felt like there was no way he could convince me, because Rwanda is not a special case. It’s
not. Armenians, Jews, American Indians …”
It was a cheerful memory. In Burundi in high school, if you asked your teacher a question he couldn’t
answer, he was apt to make you stand outside in the rain for an hour, if not for the rest of the day. “I’ve
been so blessed and lucky in spite of all these tragedies,” Deo said. “I don’t know what I would be in
Burundi, even without a war, if I hadn’t been exposed to this environment. I got so much here. To be
able to sit in a class where people have access to so much and having teachers who love teaching, who
enjoy seeing the result of their energies and their students making progress, it’s not something I was
used to. And that opened up my mind. At Columbia University the teachers were like colleagues.”
The next time he met up with his instructor in moral philosophy, the man suggested he read Hannah
Arendt on the Holocaust. As instructed, Deo read Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of
Evil. He was left asking himself, “What if the German people had said no to Hitler?” It was a question
many people had asked, of course, the same he’d asked about his own people. Reading Greek
mythology had left him, he told me, with a sense of the antiquity of murder and mayhem, but no real
explanations. Like many other students before him, he had ended his career in philosophy feeling that he
hadn’t gotten answers but only more questions. The journey had been absorbing, though. “Just walking
around here, you know, it keeps your mind busy, just thinking. I loved it,” he said.
Before we left, Deo wanted to visit some of his favorite extracurricular spots: the benches overlooking
Harlem on Morningside Drive and the Riverside Church and finally St. John the Divine, the immense
unfinished Gothic cathedral in Morningside Heights, just a short walk from the campus. We sat down in
a pew some distance back from the grand altar. There seemed to be a service in progress up there, but we
were seated too far away to hear it. “It really blows my mind,” said Deo. “The first time I was here I was
taking art, and I said, ‘God, if the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican is better than this …’” He laughed. “I
mean, just look at it.”
We were surrounded by towering columns. The place was vast, dark, and mysterious. We talked quietly.
I had the impression it was in this place and in his other sanctuaries that Deo had reconciled his
experience of genocide with his belief in God. He liked to frame his solution jocularly: “I do believe in
God. I do believe in God. I think God has given so much power to people, and intelligence, and said,
‘Well, you are on your own. Maybe I’m tired, I need a nap. You are mature. Why don’t you look after
yourselves?’” Deo would pause, then say, “And I think He’s been sleeping too much.”
Deo had spent a lot of time, in the classrooms and cathedrals of this rarefied piece of Manhattan,
thinking about the catastrophic violence in Burundi and Rwanda. He had left Columbia believing that
misery had been not the sole cause of the mayhem, but a primary cause, a precondition too often
neglected by scholars: little or no education for most and, for those who did get it, lessons in brutality;
toil and deprivation, hunger and disease and untimely death, including rampant infant mortality, which
justified all-but-perpetual pregnancy for women until menopause. He told me, “Women get so exhausted
that by the time they are thirty they walk like, you know, old ladies. And they are the ones most of the
time who do the farming. At sunset, go down the hill, get water to cook. And women are not allowed to
own property….” He went on: “Almost everyone has got worms. They are there since they were born,
and worms will be their friends until they die. Can you imagine that kind of life? It’s terrible. How are
you going to think right? With pain everywhere. So it’s been really hard to blame the people who have
been slaughtering each other, though I do blame people all the time. They were not themselves. They
were something else.”
Some histories had seemed unreal to him—for instance, the way some writers described Burundi’s
kings, as if they had lived like European kings, in palaces instead of wooden buildings with grass roofs.
Some accounts of the violence infuriated him, in part because he thought they laid too much blame on
Tutsis. Of course he saw the nightmares as he’d lived them, as a Tutsi being pursued. But he wanted to
believe that most Hutus and Tutsis in both Rwanda and Burundi had been like him, “wholly innocent,”
and that the rest had been misled by selfish elites. And even the leaders, he imagined, were probably
deeply unhappy, exercising power that had no basis except guns and machetes, so as not to become
victims of power themselves, so as to survive.
Deo’s stance seemed remarkable. How many people in his place would have divided up the world into
good guys and bad guys, Hutus and Tutsis, and left it at that? Not just philosophy but all his studies here
had helped him find a way around self-poisoning hatred.
“Really, I trained my mind to be flexible,” Deo said. “Some of the stuff I learned was, be willing to
know that even when you think you know for sure, always leave room for uncertainty. And someone
who always agrees with you is not necessarily your friend. You can always learn something good in a
hard time, if you survive it. And there is really no mathematical formula you can follow to achieve what
you want. Just trial and error.”
These were truisms, things everyone should learn in college, and I liked hearing Deo say them. He had
been able to bring himself back from a world gone irrational, back from militiamen to cows. It was
pleasant to feel this about him in the cathedral, and pleasant to think of him sitting here alone with his
thoughts in the years of his recovery. This place must have been another refuge, I thought, from that
catalogue of memories and fears, especially fears for his family, which back then and even now seemed
apt to open at random and all by itself in his mind.
“I can’t tell you how many times I came to this St. John the Divine,” he said.
“Just to sit and look and think and try to make sense of things?” I asked.
“Yes. It is so peaceful. Your mind is so open. You know, I really have been successful in finding my own
peaceful corners. On my own.”
Chapter THIRTEEN
Burundi,
June 2006
Deo had spent the summer of 2005 working in Rwanda, at a district hospital rebuilt by Partners In
Health. While there, he had thought repeatedly, “Burundi needs hospitals like this.” He had brought a
couple of PIH doctors to Burundi, to visit Kayanza, where his parents had resettled, and he had begun to
see how a clinic and public health system might be created in the village. Now, in June 2006, Deo was
going home again. He had agreed to have me come along. He would spend most of July and August
working on the underpinnings of his clinic. He and I would go a few weeks early, so he could show me
the stations of his life in East Central Africa.
I had known Deo for several years by now, and had spent a large part of the past six months in his
company. I had begun to know him well enough to realize there were things about him that I couldn’t
know. But I hoped I could get closer to an understanding by seeing Burundi and Rwanda with him.
I picked him up at his apartment in New Hampshire. Nancy and Charlie were there to see him off,
Nancy making a visible effort to keep her hands still and not help Deo pack his bags. I felt a little
nervous myself. Burundi’s civil war had ended, but only recently. Tourist guides were still warning
against travel there, and so was the State Department. A while back, Deo had sent me an article from
Amnesty International with this headline: “Burundian Police Attack Journalists.” I had sent him a
worried email. He had written in reply, “It is very safe for us to go to Burundi.” But then, in the car to
Logan Airport in Boston, Deo told me this story, about the first trip he took back to Burundi, seven years
after his escape:
It was late December 2001. Burundi’s war still wasn’t over. Friends and family, in the United States and
in Burundi, urged him not to go. His lawyer, James O’Malley, was especially worried because Deo still
didn’t have permanent residency. But Deo had to see his parents. He would never forgive himself if they
died while he was waiting for his green card. He flew from New York and arrived in Brussels on
Christmas Eve. His next plane left the following morning, so he spent the night wandering around the
airport, agitated and all alone except for a few security guards. French Christmas music and security
announcements played over and over again. He finally took shelter in the airport chapel. It was divided
into four separate chambers—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim. He went into each and said prayers,
for his family and his friends and himself. Afterward, he felt better. “So really my spirit is still alive,” he
remembered thinking, as if he had realized only then that his conversation with God could continue and
that something important remained of the part of himself that had been grown in Burundi.
About a year before his trip, in 2000, a militia group had fired at a Belgian plane as it was landing in
Bujumbura, and most long-haul flights had been discontinued. So Deo couldn’t fly directly home. First
he had to go from Brussels to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. On that long plane ride he met a fellow
Burundian, also on his way home, also for the first time in years. Deo had planned to fly on from Kigali
to Bujumbura in a small commercial plane. His new friend planned to take the bus and wanted Deo to go
with him. The bus was safer than the plane, Deo’s new friend said, and from the bus they’d get a close
look at their homeland. Deo was persuaded, but he couldn’t get a refund for his plane ticket, and his
frugality prevailed.
“I flew, he took the bus, and guess what,” Deo said to me in the car. “Around three o’clock in the
afternoon, the bus was attacked.”
The bus had been owned by the weirdly, prophetically named Titanic Express. A Hutu militia group
called FNL, a branch of PALIPEHUTU, had waylaid it. They’d ordered everyone off, sorted them out,
and murdered anyone they thought was a Tutsi, twenty-one people in all, including Deo’s new friend.
Deo got word of the massacre at his uncle’s house, in Bujumbura.
“For that whole time in Burundi I had diarrhea, fear, I threw up. I remembered how I tried hard to get a
refund for the ticket, and I thought that ‘God, I am in your hands.’ The parents. It turns out that this guy
who was killed, his parents were good friends of my uncle, and they knew that I was coming, and they
called my uncle and they said, ‘What happened to your nephew?’And he said, ‘Well, he flew and he saw
your son before.’ They came to my uncle’s house. All these people crying. His mom came and said,
‘Which hand did you use to say goodbye?’ Just smelling my hand, thinking that she could smell her son,
asking me how he had seemed, what he was wearing.”
I had packed a bottle of antianxiety pills, for the flights. Pretending to look for something else in my
briefcase, I retrieved a tablet.
I needn’t have worried. Deo and I flew that night from Boston to London. In the middle of the next
night, on the leg from London to Nairobi, Deo remarked that we were passing over Khartoum. “Sudan,”
he said to me. “Darfur. Isn’t that really crazy? People down below us now, being burned, slaughtered.”
Mostly, he spent the time telling me about the Burundi of his youth and about his hopes and plans for a
clinic. The flights were long, one was delayed for hours, but all were uneventful. After two and a half
days we were walking across the tarmac of little Bujumbura International.
Deo later told me that exhaustion from our flights had left him so addled that he was having
hallucinations, imagining that he recognized terrifying faces in the airport crowd, faces of killers. But
the rush of fearfulness he felt didn’t show. He strode into the terminal, back into Burundi again, wearing
his dark glasses and his hat—the black hat with a chin strap, the brims curved up on either side, like an
Australian bush hat. He scolded a woman who cut the line at the passport control booth. In the baggage
claim room, he greeted his tall, lanky, soft-spoken uncle cheerily, in a booming voice—they exchanged
what I took to be the customary greeting among the men of his family, each placing hands on the other’s
waist and shoulder, as if they were about to hug but then thought better of it. Then Deo took charge of
finding our baggage, barking orders right and left.
The comfort one gets from being with a person who knows his way around a place—I hadn’t anticipated
feeling this with Deo. I had known him only in his American roles, as an assistant at PIH and a medical
student, and I think my first impression of him, of youth and neediness and damage, hadn’t entirely
worn off. Not until then. Blearily watching this slender young man in his rakish hat and sunglasses, who
was carrying himself with what seemed like just the right amount of swagger—not too much to give
offense but enough to get things done—I had the feeling that somewhere between the United States and
East Central Africa he had become a size larger.
I slept a little at our hotel in the city, and was awakened by the sounds of an evangelist preaching
through a bullhorn outside on the street. The evangelist woke up Deo, too, but I was simply puzzled by
the noise, whereas Deo imagined for a moment that war had broken out again. After breakfast, he took
me on a tour of the capital.
Gashes of red earth spread across the hills above Bujumbura. It looked like a city of walls. In residential
areas especially, sheets of corrugated roofing metal had been placed on end to make provisional-looking
barriers, all high enough to block direct gunfire, which I imagined was their purpose. The stately trees
that Deo remembered on the margins of the city’s grandest avenue had been cut down and replaced by
billboards. In a little grassy square where one would have expected the statue of a national hero—such
as the beloved Prince Rwagasore, the champion of independence who died too soon—there stood
