Strength in What Remains

Tracy Kidder

Burundi is less well-known than Rwanda, but it suffers from the same ethnic rivalry between Hutus and Tutsis. The attempted genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus, and the butchery and violence that ensued, is also part of the history of Burundi.

Deo, through fortitude and the kindnesses of strangers, escaped the genocide in both his own country and Rwanda. He got to America through the help of his friend, Jean, who had a French father.

Deo’s first impression of New York was that everyone was happy going about their business, “as if they didn’t know there were places where dogs were trotting around with human heads in their mouths”. At the airport he was befriended by Muhammed, who is from Senegal, who guided him to his first home in New York, an abandoned tenement building that stank of urine and excrement. His friend helped him get a job delivering groceries 12 hours a day, six days a week. Being a poor, black African in New York meant enduring daily discrimination. The tenement became so terrifying that he preferred to sleep in Central Park.

A ‘guardian angel’ named Sharon McKenna intervened. She helped him to learn English, found him a lawyer who would help him to obtain US citizenship and introduced him to a couple who gave him a home. The first part of the book tells Deo’s story. Vivid flashbacks paint in his early life growing up in Butanza and his years as a medical student, when he escaped a massacre at the hospital. The second part is the author witnessing Deo’s journey back to Burundi after the war and his efforts to build a medical centre.