Out of Rwanda: eloquence, forgiveness

Terry Tempest Williams undoubtedly will one day write eloquently about how she became Louis Gakumba's American mom. But on a recent evening Utah's famous writer sat in the front row of a Salt Lake auditorium and just listened, as her 24-year-old Rwandan son held his audience spellbound.

"Every night I go to bed, I have to make sure I don't sleep with my legs crossed," Gakumba said. "Why? Because I often dream of people who kill me with machetes." In the dreams, 13 years after the genocide that has defined his country, he must get up quickly and run. Away from Hutus who will slash his throat, away from dogs sent into the bushes to find him.

Rwanda has become shorthand for genocide, so we think we already know what happened there. But a fresh voice can make us lean closer to know more. Like Williams, Gakumba knows the power of a dramatic pause, a quiet voice, a story.

Earlier this spring, on his third day in America, Gakumba asked Williams how he could come to know his new country. Williams took him to PETsMART.

"There I saw many surprising things," he told his audience. "I saw beds for dogs. I saw clothes for dogs. I saw toys for dogs. I saw toothbrushes for dogs." But in Rwanda, he says, dogs were trained to hunt Tutsis in the bush. "Dogs were trained to smell footsteps like mine." During the 100 days in the spring of 1994 when 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by rampaging Hutus, the dogs were everywhere, sniffing, tearing at flesh.

"They were eating the dead bodies of those we loved and still love," he says.

Gakumba met Williams in 2005 when she first went to Rwanda as part of a project called Barefoot Artists. Williams, who shares her time now between Castle Valley, Utah, and Moose, Wyo., is an environmental activist and the author of books that include "Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place" and "The Open Space of Democracy."

The Barefoot Artists project includes the construction of a Genocide Memorial Park that, as Williams puts it, will "house the bones of the dead." Her job was to document the building of the site and to "listen to people's stories." During her stay there, Gakumba was her interpreter. Later, after Gakumba tried unsuccessfully to get a student visa to come to America, Williams and her husband, Brooke, promised immigration officials that they would be responsible for his financial and emotional needs.

He moved to Salt Lake City two months ago and is now a freshman at Salt Lake Community College, where he plans to study social work. His hopes to then get a master's degree in conflict resolution and to return to Rwanda, where history has proved these skills can be put to good use.