According to Habimana, the last words his father spoke to him were “run — save your life.” The 9-year-old Habimana complied, fleeing into nearby brush to evade his attackers. He returned a short while later and found his father’s body lying in a pool of blood. A few days later, his mother and four of his siblings were also massacred. U.N. peacekeepers abandoned them and more than 2,000 Rwandans, including hundreds of children, at a Catholic school in Kigali while their killers waited at the gates.

Now an orphan, Habimana remained on the run, seeking safety and food. A band of militants found him hiding inside a schoolhouse desk, but he convinced them that he was Hutu, and they took him with them as they fled from Kagame’s army into Zaire — now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He told Goldberg’s students about his desperate existence in a Congolese refugee camp, where there was no clean water and he feared the soldiers would discover he was Tutsi. Alone, emaciated and sick with cholera, Habimana collapsed to the ground, too weak to swat flies away, ready to die.

Two Rwandan women came to Habimana’s rescue, scooping him up and caring for him as best they could. He eventually returned to Rwanda with them and reunited with an older sister, who raised him until adulthood.

Finding hope

Calhoun students asked Habimana if he was angry with the West, particularly the United States, for not intervening in the genocide. Yes, Habimana answered, to a degree: If officials had the power to stop the genocide, they should have. But his indignation was saved mostly for those who behaved badly in Rwanda, not the White House or Élysée Palace — for the U.N. peacekeepers who abandoned civilians to slaughter, and above all, for his countrymen, the ones who lived peacefully alongside their Tutsi neighbors before and after 1994 but during 100 days of that year hacked them to death with machetes.

“Sometimes I don’t think I make sense enough, because it’s crazy, it’s inhuman, it’s inhuman, it’s something else,” Habimana said about his search for answers … “It’s been a struggle … I’m still struggling, it is true; maybe until I leave this life, I still struggle, but I also feel like it’s a responsibility.”