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Strength in What Remains: A journey of remembrance and forgiveness
Tracy Kidder
By
Published: Mar 11, 2024
Category:
Non Fiction
His name — Deogratia — means “thanks to God” in Latin. When we first meet him, Deo is 24, a third-year medical student. But there’s no way he can finish school. He lives in Burundi, and this is 1994, when civil war has come to Burundi and Rwanda, and Hutu and Tutsi tribal war has degenerated into genocide. Let one image stand for many: He sees dogs in the streets with human heads in their mouths.
Escape is beyond unlikely, but Deo makes it to New York. He speaks no English, has just $200. But he’s amazingly resourceful. Housing? He finds a shell of a building in Harlem where he can sleep, then moves on to Central Park. Work? He delivers groceries for $15 a day.
How depressing is this life? Deo becomes suicidal. A kind woman introduces Deo to Nancy and Charlie Wolf, downtown artists and, by the evidence, saints. They help Deo to go to Columbia University and even pay his tuition. In less than two years, he’s once again studying medicine.
And now the circle starts to complete itself. He meets Dr. Paul Farmer — who has done so much to help the poor in Haiti and is the subject of Kidder’s masterpiece, Mountains Beyond Mountains — and goes to work for him. And then he returns to Burundi and opens a clinic of his own. [To buy the paperback of “Strength in What Remains” from Amazon, click here. To buy the Kindle edition, click here.]
One incident sticks with me and is the reason I’m writing about this book. Deo’s clinic needed a better road. A Belgian construction company gave him an estimate: $50,000, just to make it passable.
Deo shared the bad news with the people he hoped to serve. And then…
“A woman with a baby crying on her back said to me, ‘You will not pay a penny for this road. We become so much sick because we are poor, but we are not poor because we are lazy. We will work on this road with our own hands.”
The next day a hundred sixty-six people showed up with pickaxes, hoes, machetes and other tools. One of the volunteers was a woman who came to work with a sick child. Why did she come to work with a sick child? She said, “I’ve already lost three children, and I know this one is next, whether I stay at home or come to work here. So it’s better for me to join others and make my contribution, which hopefully will help to save someone else’s child, who will be sick but alive when you build your clinic.”
A six-kilometer road in Africa, built by the poorest of the poor while a Western company was still formulating its estimate for the job — you can find any number of metaphors there.
It’s easy, these days, to feel there’s nothing one person or a handful of people can do.
But then there’s a six-kilometer road.
This is Deo…
