by Tracy Kidder
I wondered whether the problem was that most of his classmates were wealthy and he wasn’t.
“Well, actually I was,” he replied. “I had Nancy and Charlie. I mean here.” He tapped the left side of his chest.
We walked on. Inside this building was where he’d studied Chaucer. “Oh, boy. That was not easy.”
And here was Philosophy Hall, an official National Historic Landmark, where John Dewey, among other luminaries, once kept an office. A casting of Rodin’s Thinker sat on a granite pedestal out front, bronze chin on hand.
The Thinker bears about the same relation to sculpture as the Mona Lisa does to painting, or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” to poetry—a great work of art that has become hard to see for itself, buried under banal associations and dumb jokes. But for the moment at least, the sculpture seemed renewed, a monument to the attempt at answering the kinds of questions Deo had brought through the arched doorway and up the marble stairs of Philosophy Hall. And it felt odd to be standing with Deo in front of such a monument, because the thing itself and everything it represented seemed so far removed from the source of those questions of his.
Deo’s course of study had puzzled me. You’d expect a penniless immigrant to major in something marketable, like computer science. But he had taken as many philosophy courses as he could fit alongside his biochemistry major, and he’d gone on taking philosophy courses all his four years here. Some time ago I had asked him why. He had said, “I wanted to understand what had happened to me.” Since coming to the United States, Deo had read some of the history that underlay what he’d endured. But when he had arrived here at Columbia, his main interest hadn’t been historical. To me, his quest sounded spiritual. How to reckon with the fact that, unlike some other genocides, the slaughters he had witnessed had been mainly low-tech mayhem, committed mostly with machetes, spears, bows and arrows? This had been true in Rwanda especially. It had been possible to kill many hundreds of thousands with hand tools only because large minorities of the population had participated. “The Belgians made a big mess, yes,” Deo said to me. “But what kind of a human being are you, if you can take a machete and kill your neighbors?”
This was the kind of question he’d been hoping to get answered here in his philosophy classes, questions about the nature of good and evil, humanity and God. They arose in him, insistently, because of his continuing discomfort in the world. He had told me, for instance, “Mutaho terrorized me. Before the genocide, I probably was naïve in terms of believing people, trusting people. Now I am always trying to be very careful. We are talking about teachers killing their students, priests killing their parishioners. Who is left to trust, really? God? God the most powerful, who let everything happen?” And people here on this campus, people he did trust not to harm him, couldn’t imagine what he’d witnessed. Deo had felt like a stranger, he said, among his classmates. One time, he’d told a fellow student that he’d grown up tending cows, and the other student had asked earnestly, “Did you keep the milk in the refrigerator?” He’d had experiences his classmates couldn’t possibly relate to their own. He had walked around the campus wearing a pleasant smile to cover up feelings that he knew no one else could share. And on the occasions when the few close friends who knew he’d witnessed genocide asked him about what he’d been through, he didn’t know how to explain. He had not yet met Paul Farmer and Joia. He had not yet told his story in full. He had thought, “There are no words.” But he had begun to look for words here at Columbia.
I imagined him sitting late at night in one of Butler Library’s twenty-four-hour study rooms, poring over the likes of Kant and Hume and Plato, his favorite of all the philosophers he read, looking for a means to close the gap between what he’d experienced and what he was able to say, looking for something reliable in a world that had become untrustworthy, looking for some sort of structured belief, some grand encyclopedia with an index in which he could look up “genocide” and learn where it fit in the universe. He was, I imagined, looking for an antidote to loneliness, both cosmic and personal. And needless to say, he hadn’t quite found it.
I liked to think of Deo here on this lovely campus, safe and far away from horror after all that he’d endured. But that distance and safety must also, inevitably, have stood like a wall between his memories and his attempts to make sense of them. What Deo had experienced made Deo mysterious, especially here. I tried to picture him with his books on his way to philosophy classes, hurrying past the Thinker, several tons of gravitas that might have said to a less experienced undergraduate, “This is what thinking looks like.” We didn’t go inside the building. I asked him what the rooms were like.
“Very beautiful rooms,” he said. He described big tables and heavy chairs and large windows.
Deo had some authority to speak about evil—far more than other undergraduates. He must have been tempted to do what he’d ended up doing at Partners In Health—to get up in a philosophy class and tell his story. This, I imagined, would have quieted the room. But he’d never done that. The closest he’d come was in the introductory course in moral philosophy.
“The instructor was a pretty young guy, pretty intense guy,” Deo remembered. “He said to the class, ‘Animals are not rational, only human beings are rational.’ That was very interesting to me. I said, ‘Well, can you explain to me how we are rational, and animals are not rational?’ And the instructor said, ‘Animals kill for food. They act on instinct, that’s it.’”
Deo had tried to digest this. He had known cows and he had known militiamen, and for rationality he thought he’d take cows any day. All the instincts bred into him at Burundian schools warned against disputing a teacher’s statements, but he couldn’t help himself. He said to the instructor that his family used to have dozens of cows, each of which had a name. You could call Yaruyange and only Yaruyange would come. How could it be said that a cow didn’t think, when every cow he’d grown up with not only knew her own name but recognized her babies among all the others and knew how to take care of hers? Cows did all sorts of interesting things, and not all could be explained with a word like “instinct.” How could the instructor say that all animals were stupid, that they didn’t think, that they had no free will? Maybe we human beings simply didn’t understand their languages. Maybe we hadn’t evolved that far. Maybe animals were laughing at us. If animals killed only for food—as they usually but not always did—then they were more rational than people. What about Rwanda? What did that say about human rationality?
Rwanda was an extreme example, said the instructor, a special case.
There were about forty students in the class, all silent. “Probably they were thinking I was a little annoying,” Deo said. But he couldn’t stop. He kept on arguing, the class ended, he cornered the instructor in the doorway, and he went on arguing with him for another half hour. When the instructor finally said he had to catch a subway, Deo said he was going to the subway, too. “I followed him 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 i
f 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.”
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 pla
nned 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.
