Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

With fewer than 300 doctors in Burundi, a country of more than seven million people, public health and medical care are, for him, the best places to start. The best of INDY Week’s fiercely independent journalism about the Triangle delivered straight to your inbox.īut Deo’s personal successes in the United States and his newly minted green card do little to quell his agony over the horrors he witnessed in Burundi or his desire to improve the lives of the Burundian people however he can. His life is so far outside the margins that, as he remembers it, the city “made you feel like you were simply not a human being.” Six years later, after meeting a series of well-connected strangers who recognize his intellectual talent and remarkable resiliency, Deo is a graduate of Columbia University, eventually headed back to medical schoolthis time at Dartmouth. He spends his first few months in New York delivering groceries, squatting in Harlem tenements and sleeping in Central Park. Twenty-four years old, Deo touches down at JFK Airport completely alone, with no contacts, no knowledge of English and $200 to his name. But Kidder recognizes that Deo’s life in America necessitates a completely different kind of survival, and it’s where this story really begins.

In the hands of a lesser storyteller, Deo’s arrival in New York City might have signified an easy, happy ending to an unthinkably dark tale. He spent six months hiding in jungles and refugee camps in both Burundi and Rwandatrekking nearly 100 miles on footbefore finally escaping to the United States in May of 1994.

Well-known for his “fly on the wall” style of narrative nonfiction, Kidder delves into the conflict through the eyes of Deo (short for Deogratias, Latin for “Thanks be to God”), a young Tutsi medical student who narrowly escaped murder at the hands of machete-wielding Hutu gangs. It is the story of that war and its equally devastating psychological aftermath that Tracy Kidder (the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 1981’s The Soul of a New Machine) recounts in his latest book, Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness.

Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder