35 pages • 1 hour read
Strength in What Remains
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Chapters 9-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: "Flights"-Part 2: "Gusimbura"
Chapter 9 Summary: “Burundi – Rwanda – Burundi, 1993-94”
In 1993, Deo has completed year three of medical school and is conducting an internship in Mutaho—a town in northern Burundi. One day, Deo is surprised when a man comes to take away his sick brother. When Deo confronts the man about this odd decision, they tell him he should leave; he refuses, and they tell him he is going to die.
Not long after this encounter, pandemonium overtakes the hotel. Deo hides, and no one finds him when armed men storm the building. Later, Deo realizes that news spread of armed bands and nearly everyone, Hutu and Tutsi, fled the hospital. The attackers must have been a militia.
Deo escapes into the fields and forest and heads toward a small church in a nearby town. He travels for hours and finds some houses, but there are dead and mutilated bodies inside. He also passes his cousin Genevieve’s school, which is burning. His new plan is to head back to Bujumbura, but close encounters with militiamen force him toward the border Rwandan border.
There are groups of refugees, mainly Hutu, also making their way north toward Rwanda. A Hutu woman who pretending to be his mother helps Deo, and together they make it past the pro-Hutu Rwandan border guards.
But crossing the border to the refugee camps does not guarantee safety. Hutu militias are recruiting there, and they and the Rwandan soldiers sometimes kill suspected Tutsis.
Deo winds up in a refugee camp where the UN Commission on Human Rights provides supplies. But a militia or paramilitary called “Interahamwe” (“Those Who Work Together”) control the distribution (131). These are young men who, in addition to controlling the supplies, are seen training with gun-shaped sticks for combat maneuvers. In this environment, Deo becomes very circumspect. He will only discuss matters such as the weather, and even eats in the dark to avoid the food-related scuffles of the day.
A wound on Deo’s back, incurred during his flight, becomes infected but he must endure it. To remain anonymous, Deo moves from camp to camp with other groups who decide to move. At his fourth camp, militiamen tell his group to head toward a school at Murambi. But when they arrive near the gathering point, chaos is unfolding. Deo, forewarned by sights he saw in Burundi, makes his way off the trail and hides. From his hiding place, he hears megaphones directing people and singing songs, and occasional gunshots and explosions.
As he makes his way the next day, he sees people herded to what he is sure are killing sites. His goal now is to find the road to Bujumbura and to follow it from the woods. Deo follows a hygiene regimen of washing and brushing his teeth, but a tooth comes loose, and he must pull it.
Fortunately, he makes it to the border, where the Tutsi Burundian army is ensuring that the Tutsis who come there are safe. The soldiers put him in a truck along with other refugees, and ship him to the capital, Bujumbura. In Bujumbura, he returns to the area of his school; however, he learns the school was a killing ground. Fortunately, he runs into Claude, the friend Deo called from New York. Claude informs him that Deo’s cousin Genevieve is alive but wounded at a hospital. Her school was attacked and the attackers tried to massacre everyone in the gym. She escaped through a window but was struck with a spear and left for dead.
Deo’s interview with Genevieve convinces him that the rest of the family must be dead. The city has become a refugee camp, full of cattle and fugitives. Deo sees fires burning on the hillsides visible from the city streets. In addition to Claude, Deo meets his medical school friend, Jean. Jean’s Hutu family is heading to Paris, but they doubt Deo can go; as it turns out, France supports the Hutu regime of Rwanda and wants to keep it happy. After some deliberation, they decide Jean’s father will say that Deo is going to become a coffee salesman in America so they can get him a visa to go there. They give him a small amount of money but tell him to inform US Immigration that he has $2000 in his bank account.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Boston, 2003”
This chapter introduces the relationship between Deo and the author, Tracy Kidder. Kidder meets Deo in Boston in 2003. He is taken by the way Deo is not American is his lack of a “protective opaqueness” that many Americans have (149).
Kidder states Deo graduated from Columbia, but this actually made him vulnerable because he lacked a green card, so he could not immediately apply for medical school. Fortunately, he was eligible enroll in Harvard’s School for Public Health. He is motivated to do this because while at Columbia, he came across a book called Infections and Inequalities. This book, about the spread of preventable disease in Third World countries, spoke directly to Deo’s own experience and his desire to change his own country. Deo tracks down the book’s author, Dr. Paul Farmer, and joins his organization—Partners in Health (PIH). Farmer is an important figure on the international debate on preventing AIDS. Of course, by the 21st century, AIDS has been largely contained in the wealthy nations, and many think the priority in the Third World should be on prevention. Farmer dissents, believing that the Third World deserves both prevention as well as the same ameliorative and curative drugs enjoyed in the West.
Deo becomes a research assistant for Joia Mukherjee, PIH’s medical director. To Joia’s consternation, she discovers Deo stays up very late at night sending her research emails. Moreover, his research too often focuses on the Internet, and on conspiracy sites. Joia speaks with him about the difference between credible and conspiracy sites and tells him to consider seeking therapy.
As Joia later tells Kidder, her father endured bloodshed during the partition of India; however, Joia’s father virtually never spoke of this, but instead displayed his trauma through hypochondria. Joia surmises that Deo’s experiences have rubbed him raw, and this always lies just beneath the surface. Sometime later, Deo is invited to give a lunchtime presentation to the PIH staff about his experience. This is an important moment for him.
Chapter 11 Summary: “New York City, 2006”
Kidder confesses that during his time meeting and talking with Deo, he felt compunctions. At times, he asked Deo whether he would prefer Kidder to cease his work, but Deo insisted he go on. Deo takes Kidder with him to important places in his life, beginning with New York. They start at the Harlem tenement home to which Deo came immediately after arriving in America. Deo notices that in fact many of the details of the area do not come back to mind upon seeing them; he was so distracted at the time there was much he overlooked.
Kidder visits the Wolfs. He learns that Charlie has a doctorate in sociology from Princeton and taught at several colleges and universities. At the time of Kidder’s visit, Charlie was a consultant, working for African countries. Before this, Charlie worked with a cousin of Sharon’s in Nigeria, helping to start a technological university there. All these aspects, among others, render the Wolfs the open-minded sort of people likely to take in someone like Deo.
Next, he sees Sharon at St. Thomas More. He describes her as “[a] beautiful, spiritual-looking woman, utterly without pretense” (171). He learns that Sharon’s parents were leftist Catholics, and that she spent time at a convent before deciding that the reality of a nun’s life was not necessarily in keeping with its dictates. At St. Thomas More, she is responsible for the flowers, but also generally helps the needy and poor. After meeting with Sharon, Kidder is intrigued by the good fortune Deo has had in meeting people who helped him survive his plight.
Chapters 9-11 Analysis
In Part 2, “Gusimbura,” the narrative shifts to the first-person perspective of Kidder, who provides the account as Deo’s observer. It is noteworthy that Kidder comes into contact with Deo in the way so many others have since Deo first met Sharon: Specifically, a mutual acquaintance introduces them because they know Kidder’s wife is interested in the topic of refugees.
Kidder notes that when Deo tells him his story, the Burundi-Rwanda portion takes only a brief time to tell while he lingers over details about New York, such as waiting in the immigration line at JFK airport. The issue of Deo’s lack of outer shielding is something that Kidder discusses in depth. He feels Deo’s trauma has rendered him very sensitive. At the end of Chapter 10, Kidder recalls a Holocaust victim he met, who refused to speak of his past: “The problem is, once you start talking it’s very difficult to stop” (160). This directly ties into the concept of gusimbura, which is a prevalent motif throughout Part 2.
Dr. Farmer and Joia Mukherjee—the medical specialists at PIH—are suitable friends for Deo based upon skills and interests. His collaborative relationship with them shows that he needs peers and friends like these. Although he was genuinely close to Sharon and the Wolfs, these voluntary and professional relationships are more stimulating and meaningful in many ways to Deo.
As Kidder begins to relate his journeys with Deo, he wonders whether these were personally of any value to Deo. Of course, it is hard to imagine the book without Kidder’s accompanying Deo on this journey through his past. Kidder’s encounters with the Wolfs and Sharon highlight the fact that there is much about these people that Deo did not ever get to know—partly because his life was so complicated, but also because he could not communicate well in English at that time.
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