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“They put everybody in a room and set the building on fire,” Tuhabonye recalled. The victims were tortured first, brutally beaten and slashed with knives and machetes. “They would beat you in the neck so that you were paralyzed by the time you got into the building,” he said. “So there was no way you were able to breathe or scream.”
He remembers the attackers asking a friend if he wanted to die in the fire inside or die outside. The youth chose to remain outside and was hacked to pieces. Tuhabonye’s inner voice spoke to him again, this time telling him he must run into the burning building.
Vicious blows to the chest broke his ribs as he ran, but he made it, hiding beneath the burning bodies and on fire himself. He contemplated suicide at one point, the pain and horror were so great, but the voice sustained him, later urging him to make his escape. He used the charred bone of a classmate to shatter a window and jump out.
Strangely, though landing in the midst of the attackers, it was as if they did not see him, Tuhabonye recalled. A runner from a young age and a national running champion while in high school, his disciplined training enabled him, despite his massive burns, to stagger off and find safety.
He would be the only one of more than 100 Tutsis rounded up in the schoolhouse to flee the holocaust alive. Lying in the hospital later, Tuhabonye tried to fathom how someone could “become evil in one second.”
Almost incomprehensible was the fact that the deadly attack had been orchestrated by the school’s headmaster, a Hutu, who had previously led the students’ chapel services. “All these people, I knew them. They were my friends,” Tuhabonye said of the attackers.
“God is the one who saved me,” says the amazingly positive Tuhabonye, now a resident of Austin and author of a book published this month by HarperCollins, This Voice in My Heart: A Genocide Survivor’s Story of Escape, Faith, and Forgiveness. “Forgiveness has become part of my life,” he said, noting that revenge is a never-ending cycle.
He would later meet one of the persons who had tried to kill him that day, a man who had sprayed gasoline on the burning school building. “I let him go,” Tuhabonye said simply, adding that it was an “unbelievable feeling” to rise above the need for revenge.
It was his Catholic faith that allowed him to do so, he noted. Up to sixth grade he attended Catholic mission school and had even wished to become a priest at one time. Being one of only two sons, however, his parents had forbidden it.
Drawing on his Catholic upbringing during his convalescence, Tuhabonye turned first to the Bible’s verses on forgiveness, basing his response to his terrible ordeal on three guiding principles he still adheres to: putting God first, forgiveness and discipline.
It is his running that has enabled Tuhabonye to be able to forgive. “Running has helped me a lot,” he related, “because I was able to focus on a different goal than revenge for those who had tried to kill me.” Describing his running as a form of therapy, he observed, “Running is something that can help you forget things and move on.”
He arrived in the United States in 1996 to train for the upcoming Olympics, later becoming a national champion runner while attending Abilene Christian University — despite his extensive burns and the resulting scar tissue.
Today he is a celebrity in world running, employed by RunTex stores in Austin and training runners in a program called Gilbert’s Gazelles. Started in 2002 with just three runners, the program has expanded to close to a thousand people today, accepting runners on all levels from beginners to professionals. It is more than just a job to Tuhabonye, however. It is his ministry.
“I try to teach from my heart,” he says, providing love and encouragement to those in the Gazelles. He notes that when people see him and learn what he has been through, they are able to put in perspective things in their lives and learn to maintain a positive attitude. He is also a popular motivational speaker.
Tuhabonye speaks wistfully of his native land, Burundi, which he describes as “a beautiful country” with temperate weather year round and filled with flowers and forests. He has returned to his native land only once, in 1999, applying for political asylum after that, and does not plan on going back. “The people that tried to kill me are still out there,” he said. “I could get killed in a second.” He sees himself being able to do more good for Burundi from a distance.
Asked of his plans, Tuhabonye, says, “I want to be involved in bringing peace.” He hopes to accomplish this through his positive message of forgiveness. “If you can love your neighbor,” he said, “if you can forgive your neighbor for the little things they do to you, it will be easy to forgive the big things.”
He sees a large part of the unrest in Burundi as caused by lack of education and poverty, which creates masses who are easily manipulated. He hopes to establish a scholarship foundation for low income students as a means to change this. “I understand the psychology, the mind of these people,” he said, “and how they get involved in violence.”
Tuhabonye was attending boarding school when his personal experience with ethnic violence — the schoolhouse massacre — took place. He proudly notes that in the part of Burundi he is originally from, the Tutsis and the Hutus have learned to get along with one another. “We do stuff together,” he said. “We play together. When we have a party, we invite one another.” He adds, “We just have to spread this to the other parts of the country.”
“I'm a positive believer,” he said. “I believe that miracles happen. So I think one day we will find peace.” |