[00:00:10] Speaker A: Welcome to that Makes Total Sense, a podcast dedicated to exploring God's generosity and justice. I'm Alexis Busetti, a Christian, aiming to ask good questions and encouraging you to do the same.
Every one of us is wired by God to live out generosity and justice, but the how sometimes eludes us. That makes Total Sense is a way for us to get together, posture ourselves as learners, and challenge one another to practice generosity and justice in a tangible way every day.
David, I shared with you before we started recording that this book was. It was really interesting and fun for me to read, mostly because I have a friend who is a genocide survivor from Rwanda.
She actually fled to Burundi. We'll talk a little bit about those political dynamics today. But it was very interesting to read someone who had similar stories and also many, many differences in their stories just based on the politics, the national politics that were happening at the time.
Say what the book is. I'm here with David Toole, author, professor. He's written a beautiful book called Love Made Me an Inventor, the Story of Maggie Barranquitse, Humanitarian, genocide Survivor and citizen without Borders. David, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
[00:01:49] Speaker B: Yes, you're welcome. I'm glad to be here.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: This.
Gosh, before we get into the politics that I just mentioned, one of the things that I thought was so intriguing is that in this book, you say, with no qualms, you were not writing a book. Like, you were not writing a book about Maggie.
And then I held in my hand a book about Maggie. So I'm wondering if you can tell us about your introduction to Maggie and the fact that you didn't realize during all of this time in your relationship, much of the time in your relationship, that this would turn into be a book about her life.
And then maybe as we transition, why, like, why did you end up feeling compelled to tell this story?
[00:02:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
So I met Maggie for the first time in January 2009, and the reason that I was in East Africa at the time was only tangentially related to where I met her. So I.
I was working in the Divinity school at Duke at the time, and the dean of Duke Divinity School was starting to do various things in Africa, one of them through the center for Reconciliation, which was newly started in the Divinity School at the time.
There was a leadership program for Christian leaders in East Africa focused on issues of reconciliation in essentially all the East African countries that had, in one way or another, conflict and post conflict things going on.
But I actually was over there to attend that workshop that the Divinity School was putting on, but just as an observer, because the dean wanted to check in on what other staff had actually pulled off.
But the other reason I was there was a grant funded project at Duke where I had been assigned by the dean to be the Divinity school representative on an interdisciplinary team that included the business school, the medical school, the global health Institute. And we were supposed to be doing leadership and management training in the health sector in Uganda.
And so that particular trip was my first time to Africa.
And also I had no background in public health.
I was going there at the behest of a dean who said, I need someone to go, go.
So I went and I spent a week in Uganda at the beginning to start understanding the Ugandan context ahead of a grant project on the health sector.
And then because I had intentionally combined trips, I flew to Burundi, where I attended what at that time was a three day workshop that was being put on by the directors of the center for Reconciliation, one of whom was Emmanuel Katangale, a Ugandan, who wrote the foreword to the book.
And, you know, he tells the story at the foreword. But I honestly had never been to Africa or thought really that I would ever go to Africa.
And suddenly I was. I had spent a week in Uganda sort of, you know, trying to absorb that reality. And the next thing I knew, I was in Burundi, which had just come out of a long civil war. So this was January 2009, depending on how you count. I mean, really, as I say in the book, the last of the rebels had come in from the bush in December, just a month before.
So the country was still full of roadblocks by the military. And so when we did drive across the country to see Maggie's work in Ruigi, we were going through checkpoint after checkpoint after checkpoint.
So it was all quite stunning to me, frankly, just to say that way. Plus those three days in the workshop where Maggie came to speak at the last minute, as I describe in the book, Emmanuel Katongole didn't know her, but had heard of her and was able to contact her. And because she's so wonderfully willing to do anything, she just showed up, not in the agenda, but showed up and he found space for her to tell her story.
So she told her story in that conference setting and then invited us to go see her work in Ruigi, which is on the other side of the country.
And all of this, of course, is happening for me as a white guy from the west who never had any idea that he'd end up in a place like this, trying to absorb sort of the history of this geographical region and why it was that. I had been in a room at that point for the conference, roughly 70, mostly Africans, all of whom were working in the trenches of reconciliation in places like Rwanda and Burundi. And I was just listening to story after story after story of the trauma of the Rwandan genocide, the Burundian genocide, the long, long conflict in northern Uganda, the troubles at that time.
This is pre formation of South Sudan, but the long, long, long civil war in Sudan.
And so Maggie was this thing that popped up in the middle of that with invitation to come see what I do.
And so that's how we met.
[00:07:04] Speaker A: And you continued a relationship with Maggie that has lasted years and years.
[00:07:11] Speaker B: Yeah, and the reason I don't think I didn't ever know I was writing a book till toward the end is, yeah, I did, in fits and starts. And so. And it centered on the visit in 2009 when she invited us after speaking in this conference, and she invited us to come see her work in Ruigi.
And so we drove across the country with her and spent a day sort of as she took us from site to site to site of all of the amazing things that she was doing.
You know, a swimming pool and a movie theater for children in the middle of Roeburugi at that time, a brand new hospital that was built on what had been the site of her family village that was destroyed on the front end of the war.
And so as she's taking us to these various sites, the thing that just really grabbed me, I mean, it is the thing that caused me to stay, to want to stay in conversation with her, not thinking about a book or anything, but honestly, just like I needed to figure it out, is when we were touring the hospital, which was a brand, it was a year old, still somewhat under construction, but essentially done, 120 bed hospital in a sort of typical African fashion because of the climate, I mean, single story buildings that are connected by walkways and verandas.
And she was touring us around all of this, and as we moved around the back of the wards, there was this large, large building there. And she pointed to that and said, and that's the morgue.
And she then went on and on and on about the morgue in a way that really lifted it up as the most important building in the whole complex. And then showed us the relationship between the morgue, which sort of sat behind the wards and then the chapel, which was on the way out of the hospital complex back to the main road, and talked about the relationship between the Morgue and the chapel.
And you know, I didn't. I mean, now, it seems like now makes perfect sense to me. But at the time I didn't understand how someone who had founded a hospital would spend so much time talking about the morgue. She did take us at the same time, right?
I narrate in the book. I honestly can never remember if it was before or after. I think it was after she took us to her house, which was right next to the government hospital, which was a really under resourced, poor, poor, poor dismal place.
And jet just off the back corner of that hospital, she had built a chapel, a small chapel. And she took us into the chapel and we all were just sitting, you know, it was only about a half a dozen of us and we were sitting in the chapel with her. And she then explained to us that the reason she put the chapel there was so that when people died in the hospital, the government hospital, she would go into the hospital and let families know if there were people that on the verge of death or someone had. She'd learned someone died. Please bring the bodies into my chapel and we will take care of them. We will prepare them for burial.
And again, like now it all makes perfect sense. At the time, I just could not put the pieces together.
Why was the morgues at her hospital so important? Why had she effectively like sort of designed the physical layout of the hospital around the morgue and then, and then, even though she tried to explain that in a sense by taking us to the, to the alternative. Because the morgue at the government hospital was a little teeny bamboo shack out the back door with a little wooden table. I mean, it was, it was. There's no place that you would imagine a body actually going and being cared for. Her morgue could hold six bodies at the same time with families coming and preparing people for burial as she would, with flowers and singing. And you know, everything with Maggie involves flowers, by the way, like flowers everywhere, all the time.
And so really what happened then that was January of 09, because of the grant project on Health in Uganda and because this now was becoming an annual conference that moved from Burundi in that year to Uganda and is still going on. And every year since in Uganda, I had opportunity to go back and forth to East Africa either for the health work for a couple of years or for the center for Reconciliation's leadership Conference.
And whenever I did, I tried to connect with Maggie. And it was easy in the conference because she was either coming as a speaker or she also just started coming to hang out with people who were, you know, doing the similar, similar work. So, so I just, every chance I got, I. I mean, it was very uncomfortable for me, actually. I. I don't. I'm not good at this. I don't. I don't like sitting down and, and interviewing people and asking people questions about their life. But I. I was just so stunned.
I just wanted to. I just wanted to figure it out, like, so I would. So, you know, in the first, I think, 2010, and, you know, I'm at this conference with her and I'm able to steal her at a lunch table or something, and I just say, okay. So, like, I'm trying to, you know, just say more, say more. And she was always so gracious, like, would. Would never not say more.
And slowly that conversation grew and grew and grew. And every time I went, I started deeping in it. And the only thing that started to happen then is 2014. So five years in, because of all the public health work I was doing, I decided to go back to school and do an mph. So I'm at Duke in University of North Carolina. Chapel Hill is eight miles away. They have a great public health program. So I went there while working at Duke and did an mph and I had to write a thesis, which I didn't really want to do, having barely survived my PhD dissertation.
But I had to. And I thought, okay, well, it's got to be path of least resistance if I'm going to do this. And so I decided to do a thesis that was a case study of four East African hospitals, all of which were, in one way or another, mission hospitals or legacy mission hospitals. Maggie's hospital was not a mission hospital, but Maggie herself was the product of missionaries.
And so one of the hospitals that was one of the four case studies was Rhema Hospital in Burundi that I had seen in 2009. And that then was caused to dig deeper into Maggie's story and into the hospital.
So at that point, I knew I was writing something, but I was just writing a thesis, a piece of a thesis to get my degree.
And so it went like that for years.
[00:13:33] Speaker A: David, we're coming back to the morgue. I really want to come back to the morgue. But before we do, I'm going to ask you to do something that for me would be impossible for you. It's going to be much easier. But also, I'm just saying do your best.
We have a short amount of time, but we have talked around it a little bit. But especially as you bring up the morgue what was happening in the hospitals at the time, and that much of Maggie's work is in response to what she and her community lived through.
I'm wondering if you can give us some context for. For Maggie's and her community, her family's life in Burundi at the time of the genocide, civil war that brought so much tragedy into the country.
I mentioned this in part, as I mentioned my friend who is a Rwandan genocide survivor, that the Rwandan genocide is one that is, I think, publicly just more well known than what was happening in Burundi at the time or, you know, later.
But still the same people groups are involved. This is the same region of Africa. It's very, very complex politically. There is a history. You know, one of the things my friend says, this, this didn't start in the 90s. You know, this. This goes back and back and back. And there is definitely some of that in the book. And like I said, it's a hard assignment, but I'm just looking for a little bit of context to help us understand Maggie's story a little bit better, especially as a Burundian woman, because we'll get into that with what ended up happening in Maggie's life after the work that you just described, or she founded. That she founded in Burundi.
[00:15:42] Speaker B: Right. Well, I appreciate the question, and I will try to do it the best I can. And briefly, the book actually opens up after a preface where I'm just describing meeting Maggie with a prologue that's now, I think, seven pages. It was double that length, and the editor convinced me to shorten it just so we could get to Maggie's story. But I really insisted that I have to put this prologue in there because otherwise the story starts with these incredible acts of violence that are just sort of stunning. Right. So. So I wanted to put in context, even though I knew readers would have to sort of slog through it.
So I think the. The important thing to keep in mind is so historically, if you go to the pre colonial times, Rwanda and Burundi were kingdoms with a lot of similarities, but also differences. And one of the things that has happened postcolonialism is they got squashed together as if they were the same thing.
So. So what we now think of as the ethnicities of Hutu and Tutsi existed in both countries.
The kingships formed up in both countries, and they all speak the same language. I mean, Kirinwanda and Kirundi are essentially the same language.
And so pre colonial times, a lot of similarities with some significant differences around how kingship worked.
What then happened Once the, you know, once the, the, the, the Germans and Belgians come in and the Belgians are there until independence in the 60s is the ethnicities effectively become reified and, and cemented as these, these actual things that we now think of as ethnicity, along with all of the things in the background of that, that create the conflicts that lead to something like the Rwandan genocide, which really are very much, you know, so called, colonially orchestrated over, over decades and decades.
What happens in, what happens between the two countries that's so important for Burundi is that, that just before independence in Rwanda, the Rwandans have a revolution. It's a Hutu revolution.
The Hutus in both countries are always the majority. The Tutsis are the minority, but the Tutsis, because of being supported by the Belgians, were in control.
So the Hutus in 1950 revolt in, in Rwanda. And as a result, and this, this correctly impacts Maggie's story as a result. What happens is a lot of Rwandans flee to Burundi, the country right next door, to escape the violence of the Hutu revolution, which is when Maggie first meets what, what actually is the beginning of, of the kind of ethnic tensions that create the genocide and that created multiple genocides from 1959 up to 1993 and 94.
And she was just an elementary school kid who wondered who all these refugees were who were suddenly showing up in her classroom.
And the answer is that they were Rwandans escaping what in fact was with ethnically charged violence in Rwanda. So from that point forward, you have a lot of interplay between Rwanda and Burundi as Tutsi and Hutu are moving back and forth across the borders, escaping from one another, depending on who has the power and is instigating the violence. The moment that really blows up in 1972 in Burundi when Maggie is 16 and in high school, because again, you've got, in this case, deep violence of really, it starts with, with Hutus. But you've got a, an incredible response from, from the Tutsi who at that time really have more power and control.
And they start, I mean, effectively no one knows for sure, but 200, 250,000 Burundians are killed in 1972 in a genocide of Tutsi against Hutu.
From Maggie's perspective, what that looks like, again, just as a student in class is suddenly some of her Hutu teachers don't show up for work and some of her Hutu classmates have lost their fathers without quite knowing what has happened to their fathers.
And that's 1972, when Maggie is 16.
And so when you get to 1993, which is Maggie's story, as she would say, it's not actually where her story starts, but it's where the trauma that she lives through that is the foundation of much of the work starts.
What you have is in Burundi six months before the Rwandan genocide that starts in April of 94. So in October of 93, you have a democratically elected Hutu president. Not surprising that it's a Hutu president in a democracy, because they're by far, the Hutus, are by far the majority of democratically elected Hutu president who is assassinated by a Tutsi controlled military or a group of people within the military.
And the country blows up in October, initially with Hutu who have just lost their democratic elected president to Tutsi violence marauding across the country and wiping out Tutsi. Maggie is a Tutsi. And so when Maggie's family village is Destroyed in October 93, it's a result of that Hutu revenge against the assassination of their president.
And so that, that's, that's six months before the Rwandan genocide. And you're right, it's like most of us don't know about it because six months later, Rwanda blew up in, in a similar, but, but different circumstances. Right?
And, and, and, you know, maybe it's just because of the numbers of dead, maybe it's because it was a, it was, it was, you know, something close to a million people in a hundred days. I mean, it's, it's definitely more dramatic in that sense. But in Burundi, the very similar ethnically charged genocidal violence was going on, but Instead of being 100 days, it lasted, depending on how you count years, it lasted from 93 to 2008. Really.
And, and that's, that's where Maggie really is living from 93 on, from 93 to 2015 until she has to flee the country. She's living for the most of that time in the middle of an ethnically charged civil war as a Tutsi who is doing her best to save Tutsi and Hutu children from what's happening not only with the war, but also with HIV AIDS, because this is the 90s and HIV AIDS is at its peak.
And so death is everywhere. And she's doing her best in the midst of that to be very creative and responsive to that. And that was the origins of Mazon Shalom, her organization, and all of the amazing work that she did that we encountered when she told us the story back in 2009.
[00:22:35] Speaker A: David, I, I'm wondering how much should be said about when you. When you said Maggie's village was destroyed, children were orphaned.
Strikes me in this moment that I will just say my personal feelings are. I really would like to skip over that part because of the violence.
It's almost like, gosh, I don't want to repeat it. And at the same time, I struggle because the other part of me says, we've got to name it.
We've got to name it somehow.
Maybe we can do this. I will say much of Maggie's story is recorded in the book period.
Much of the violence is there. But I would invite you, David, maybe, to share some of those parts of Maggie's personal story of her and her family when their village was destroyed.
Because, as you said, it's not where Maggie's story started, but much of Maggie's work was birthed out of what happened to her and what happened to her family and her community.
And I will say this.
It is not what we would think the natural consequence of that kind of violence would be. Maggie's work defies what I think any of us would say would be the natural consequence. I mean, even. Even just that old, like, hurt people, hurt people.
You know, violence begets violence. This is not Maggie's story. And I think that it is quite remarkable, the violence that she survived and then what she chose and continued continues to choose to do as a survivor. And in the wake of that. So, yeah, so I'll invite you, and maybe in a similar fashion, to say there's a lot there, but what you would find to be maybe the most significant parts of Maggie's story for these purposes.
Yeah, tell us what happened. Tell us what she endured.
[00:25:19] Speaker B: Right.
Yeah. I mean, it is important because the most amazing thing about Maggie, and I think it's the other. I mean, okay, I was curious.
I couldn't figure something out. I'm an academic. I wanted to figure it out. So I chased Maggie down to ask more questions. But it wasn't simply that. It was also the case that when you meet Maggie and I have seen this happen to every single human being I've ever introduced her to in small rooms, big rooms like it is.
It never doesn't happen.
There's something about her that is gripping because she is so joyful, and she will be. She's incredibly upfront about the fact that that joy is.
It would maybe be wrong to say it's a response to the violence, though. It is a response to the violence, but it's.
She just believes that that's what we're supposed to be as human beings because God made us who we are. And as she likes to put it, we are princes and princesses and we all wear crowns. And we have to constantly be reminded that that's the case. And the fact that someone can show up in a room and so thoroughly embody that. I mean, that's the thing. She doesn't. She doesn't just say it like, I mean, she exudes it. I mean, I've never been in the presence of another human being who, who exudes what she exudes. Like, you're just sucked into this world of like, oh, my God. That's the other thing that kept me coming back.
And she's not shy of letting you see that. That joy is there to some extent, in spite of the violence, but also because of the violence. I mean, because it really. And that's the. You know, so when we were first going to tour the hospital, she stopped on the road to the hospital, which sits on a hill just above Ruigi, kind of flat top till. And she stopped and we all got out because she wanted to show us the context of what we were about to see, which was the hospital.
And in, as she's describing the buildings that we can see from a distance, she says, you know, so this is where my family's village was. And, and, and we're seeing the hospital on top of what the family village been. The family village had been. More. More. I've, you know, because I always wanted to know exact, exact facts. Right. You know, I would ask these questions, but it's something in the order of 60 members of her family, immediate family, aunts, uncles.
She has one brother who survived.
They died when Hutu overran the village and killed people, burned their houses down.
And it was just razed.
And so she tells us that that was where the village is. And then we drive up to the hospital, and we're walking into the hospital, and one of my colleagues just asks her, because you're all sort of stunned by this. And she said, did we hear you correctly, that where we are now, which is the hospital, this is built on top of the village that was destroyed in 93. And she said, yes, yes. And when we get inside, it's just a series of buildings and courtyards. I'll show you where my mother's house was.
And so there's a sense in which she's always more than willing to connect the building of a hospital to the fact that. Yeah, well, and also, 60 members of my family died when I was with her most recently in Rwanda just last summer. You know, I saw a very similar thing when Rwanda is full of genocide memorials, you know, well over 200 genocide memorials around the country.
And one of the things that Maggie just said is she hates how Rwanda has memorialized the genocide in part because what does it mean to be a Hutu and to show up in one of these memorials? Because the memorials are very graphic and.
And the narrative that goes with them, it's not unlike the Jewish narrative. Never again. But if it's never again.
And it's displayed in the way it's displayed graphically with skeletal remains, et cetera, and genocide morals, and you're a Hutu, like, this doesn't feel like reconciliation to Maggie. But the other thing she doesn't like is as they remember the genocide in Rwanda, everything closes. Everybody wears black. Like it's this very dark day. And Maggie just says, yeah, that's just wrong.
Like, yes, a lot of people died. This is what she says of her own trauma. Like, yes, in. In October of 1993, a lot of people died, including more than 60 members of my family.
But we're still here, and we're still here, and we are doing these things and these things. Then, you know, when she was in Burundi, it's the tens of thousands of orphans that she takes care of. Now in Rwanda, it's the tens of thousands of refugees, many of whom a Burundian, but not all.
And so we're still here. And so she celebrates Maison Shalom, the organization that, you know, through which she does all this work. She celebrates the founding of Mazon Shalom on the day every year that she herself lived through the trauma in which she was tied to a chair and made to watch as the perpetrators of violence killed 72 people in front of her, including her best friend, who was beheaded with Maggie a few feet away. And she celebrates her organization on that day as a way of saying, hey, and this is this again. When she shows up in the room, this is what you get.
You get the Maggie who is so unbelievably joyful because she believes so deeply that the world that we live in was a creation of God, and it is beautiful.
And, yes, these horrible things happen, but we can't let them determine who we are. And she just never has.
[00:31:03] Speaker A: I gathered from Maggie's story and what's portrayed of her outlook that what you just described is not some sort of toxic Christian triumphalism.
This exists. And Maggie's story and outlook did not strike me as that. I would say in part, because in her joy, at least what I gathered from reading her story, in her joy, she is doing stuff that is a result that. That needs to be done as a result of the violence. For example, she is caring for orphans, children who lost everything, every member of their family, as a result of this violence. And that is hard work. Parenting is hard work in general.
But all of these children who she has cared for as her own, who she has cared for in these organizations and communities and buildings that she had built with her efforts, her sweat, blood and tears, so to speak, and how she relates to death. So maybe kind of circling back around to that. It's not an ignoring of what has happened. And so she can have joy there is. Because I think it seems like Maggie is modeling what it looks like to embrace all of these parts of your own story.
One of those things.
I just had these annotations in your book as I was reading about how profound some of these words were of Maggie's. And. And one of the examples is she says to teach people to care for the living, she had to teach people to care for the dead.
And if I'm not mistaken, you help me, David. I think this was in a part of the book where she was saying, like, there's just bodies everywhere and mass graves and people's remains treated with disrespect or ignored. And.
And so after all of this, Maggie sees part of her job to come back in and help her community, maybe relearn how to care for the dead.
That just felt so profound to me to.
That it was so significant and important for her to encourage and to model caring for the dead. But then her connection to caring well for the dead, helping us also and leading to helping to care for the living better.
Can you talk about that? I mean, we touched on it before that it's modeled in, like, physically, the morgue being the center of the hospital, which is wild that these things being built on top of villages that were raised.
Maggie doesn't run from death in that way. I mean, this is something that. I think it's natural for many of us to want to separate ourselves from that. I'm from a small town in Oklahoma, and the cemeteries are on the outskirts of town. We didn't have maybe, for example, a large, you know, Catholic population that might have like a, you know, like a parish cemetery or something like that, that we would encounter even the remembrance of death on a very regular basis. You kind of had to go out of your way to even encounter that or memorialize it. But For Maggie, she embraces this and finds this to be very necessary to her life and how she cares for the living.
[00:35:26] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a lot there. I mean, just before I forget, I mean, one thing, of course there is, given the way you talked about cemeteries in Oklahoma, for example, that, you know, there. And I have talked with Maggie about this. There are deep Burundian traditions around caring for the dead that are quite different than our traditions such that, for example, they don't put people in cemeteries. And in fact, though they do do that now, the cemeteries are not cared for well, because there's not a lot of respect for cemeteries because it's just a different tradition.
And so they buried. Traditionally, they would bury family members in the yard and then plant a tree over the grave.
So there's just a cultural difference of how you think of. And I've seen this a lot in Africa. I mean, when someone dies, death is everywhere, and everybody understands it and knows it, and. And so they care for bodies differently, and bodies aren't there. Like, I mean, you see them, right? And you see how they're cared for. So in that sense, there's just a cultural difference. But I think when you really get to the sorts of deaths that are happening with hiv, AIDS and the war and what Maggie's encountering in the streets, where, as she puts it, bodies had just become corpses and people, you would step over them. Or in the school that the Catholic bishop ultimately gives her as there's too many kids to have where she was housing them.
They had to clean up the school, which was in a band and the windows broke out and it was full of corpses. Right.
So the bodies are just around. And so she did indeed. And where she told us that I just didn't understand it is it was the visit we made in 2009 when she took us to her chapel next to the government hospital and told us about the way she invited the families to bring their dead there. She did, I think, effectively say why she did it. Right. Is that I've learned that you'd have to care for the dead in order to care for the living. And people had lost that. Clearly, they'd lost it. Like the dead were just corpses.
I did, but I didn't understand what she meant at that time. Like, I. It just was so foreign. So it did take me years to really start to see that.
I think what's really interesting about her, the way that death works for her, is how deeply Christian it is. So you're right. There's no Christian triumphalism. Here, what you actually have is. And Maggie will talk at length about this.
Her great hero in life is her mother, who died before the massacre. Her mother died of cancer in 1989.
And when Maggie was growing up as a little girl, they went to mass every day. And her mother was hugely formative for how Maggie saw the world as a Catholic Christian.
And the biggest part of that was the message that was consistently drilled in is we are, as Maggie puts it, we are all one human family. Which is really the origin of her ability to not see the world as a divide between Hutu and Tutsi, because her mother had told her from the time that she was teeny that, like, we're all one human family. Which became a problem later when, when suddenly Hutu and Tutsi became categories and they were killing one another. And Maggie actually came back to her mother, said, well, you lied to me. Well, apparently we aren't one human family because, you know, now we see Tutsu killing Hutu, etc, so, so there's the, there is, in her, in her Christianity, There is this sense that's, that's, I think, I think it's both theologically accurate. It's also what she learned as, which is that we really are all in this together, whatever faith we come from, wherever we come from. Now that said, though, Maggie, and this is one of the, I think, wonderful and remarkable things about her is you cannot have a five minute conversation with Maggie without becoming theological because, and, and this is not true. I, another guy that I've, I've gone and visited in Sudan, runs a hospital there, American guy, you know, when I tried to engage him about why he's doing these amazing things in the world, like, I get the simple message. He said, well, you know that passage in the Gospels where Jesus, the rich man, comes to Jesus and, and says, what do I need to do? Inherit Jesus life? And Jesus said, do this, do that. And he said, yeah, I've done those things. He said, well, sell everything you own and follow me. He said, well, I just thought he was serious. And, and so hence, you know, I moved to Sudan, to a remote region of Sudan and run a hospital. And, you know, and that's like all he'll say. There's, there's not. Like you don't get theological depth. There's a lot of theological depth in his existence, but he doesn't articulate it. Maggie doesn't know how to narrate her own story without always articulating the way in which it is made possible by her understanding of her Faith. And often that comes out in literal descriptions of biblical stories and biblical characters, right, that she just lives her life that way. And so when it comes to death, she, she just, she understands it in theological terms and does not run for it precisely because if you believe that this world is not actually the end, then in death is not the evil thing that we imagine it to be. Or maybe, I mean, there's theological debates about whether death is evil or not, but it's, it's certainly, it's not something that we have to run from or be scared of because in fact, it's not the end. And, and so that allows her to stay in it. And then I think also the, the thing to add to all of that is if you live through what she lived through, which is both, both witnessing horrific violence over and over and over again, sometimes right in front of you and having to find a way to survive in that and your own life multiple times itself being at risk. I mean, it was certainly at risk in October of 93 when she was tied to the chair because she was trying to protect Hutu from, from Tutsi, some of whom were her own family members, seeking revenge against the Tutu for the destruction of the village. You know, she's putting herself in between the perpetrators of violence and the innocence that she's trying to save. And so certainly her life was in great jeopardy at that moment. And, and, but they didn't kill her. She survives.
But then there are multiple attempts on her life after that. And so, so I think existentially she, she absolutely has come to terms with death. But what's allowed her to come to terms with death is her deep faith in, in Christianity as she understands it, with the biggest part of that being the focus on the cruc, not without the resurrection, but, but the crucifixion for her is the most amazing thing. And, and that, and that sustains her. And then the last thing I'd say is the cancer, because that, you know, when she was diagnosed with, with late stage breast cancer at 60, I think 66, it was actually a completely different encounter with death than she had before.
And, and, and I try to narrate some of this in the book. It was, it was a really profound thing for her to experience.
And as with all things Maggie, she responded to it completely different than the rest of us would.
But that's now to be expected. But there's a great, and I think I describe it in the book, I think I had time to do the late edition. So when she was diagnosed with cancer in Luxembourg. The oncologist invites her into the consultation room and he's about to inform her that she has late stage breast cancer, prognosis is not good.
And so he's sitting in a chair, she's sitting in chair, and he's conveying the bad news. And, and so Maggie laughed when he told her this and he didn't know what to do. Like, why are you laughing? And she said, well, you know, she said, I think, I think maybe we should switch chairs because it's clear, it's clear to me that, that you need some help in coming to terms with death.
I don't. Right.
And, and later when she's, you know, had treatment and has been at least at the moment, you know, clean clear of cancer, she goes back to visit, I guess, a couple years later, and the whole oncological team that was treating her in Luxembourg gathers together and gives her €5,000 in an envelope. Because they say, you know, when we are invited to consult with people, like, we're paid for this, right? When you were here, your cancer treatment, you, you, you were our consultant. And we've never paid you, we need to pay you because we really, like, we're people who spend a lot of our lives treating people who are, you know, confronting death. And maybe they make it, maybe they don't. And like, we didn't actually know how to do that in the way that you taught us to do it. So that's, again, that's the remarkable thing about her, is that she's, she's able to, to take down death as this essential thing that we all, I mean, we all know we're going to die. We, we are as human beings, fundamentally mortal. We cannot escape it. But as you said, it's also the thing that we do, we try very hard not to pay attention to. And Maggie's life is as rich as it is, I think, because she, for her, that's always close, but, but because of her faith, it's also the source of, or the it. Her faith allows her to stay joyful in spite of how close it is.
So, yeah.
[00:44:30] Speaker A: So you mentioned in that that there were a lot of threats on Maggie's life prior to the cancer. These were political threats.
And this, I don't know why it dumbfounded me, but it did. Like, in some ways I'm, like, it shouldn't have been shocking, but it was shocking.
I mean, is it somewhat accurate to say that Maggie's like, existence and her work was threatening somehow in Burundi? And what do you make of that and the reasons for her going into exile.
That's wild to me.
[00:45:18] Speaker B: Yeah. So, I mean, I think there's layers to it. So there's a great. When she won the opening opus Prize in 2008, there's a great video the Opus Prize did of sort of her work at that point where they have a Burundian man in the video who's saying, you know, in Burundi, women follow and men walk in front, but Maggie. And he sort of laughs as he said this, but Maggie walks in front. Right. And so part of it in the Brunian context is absolutely. She was threatening.
Not even politically threatening, but. But threatening because she was an incredibly strong woman who was walking in front in a culture where women don't do that, and then in doing that, becoming very successful. Right. So she was creating an organization. She was getting dollars from foundations, from, you know, UN organizations, from usaid, from donors. Right. She's building all this thing in rural Burundi where there are, you know, provincial governors, for example, who are watching her success and becoming envious of it. So. So one of the earliest assassination attempts against her, which I believe was in 2007, was actually, she now knows, because she's since met him, was ordered by the provincial governor. It failed. They killed a French woman by mistake and then accused Maggie of killing the French woman.
But that really wasn't so much political as like, he's worried that Maggie's going to take his seat or anything like that, as much as he just couldn't stand the. That fact, fact that this woman had become so successful in what she was doing, which took away from his. So there's a kind of very basic humanness here of jealousy that was part of it. But as things escalated over the years then, she did become, in the eyes of the government, a political threat.
And that had to do more than anything. That had to do with the fact that she did become.
She became vocal against what the government was doing in a way that she hadn't been before. She always had been vocal. If it had to do with children and defending children, she would always speak up.
I mean, this is one of her great qualities. She's incredibly courageous and will always call it as she sees it.
So she was always speaking up for children, but she wasn't speaking up for children against a government or for the people against a government. And as you know, so Burundi comes out of the war in 2008, there's a long sort of process of them having a workable government again. And by the time you get to 2014, 15.
That government is starting to reproduce a lot of the problems that had led to the civil war.
And so there then became a very active political opposition that formed over years.
And in 2015, some generals in the army actually had attempted a coup.
It failed.
And leading into that, Maggie had become vocal against the government. She was never part of the cadre of folks who were literally trying to overthrow the president.
But the kinds of things that she was saying in public, from the government's perspective, aligned her with that. And so it's at that point that then the government orders an assassination attempt against her in 2015, which miraculously she escapes from, and then has been living in exile ever since, formally in Luxembourg and then spending most of her time in Rwanda.
[00:49:01] Speaker A: And she longs to return.
[00:49:04] Speaker B: She does.
[00:49:07] Speaker A: She loves Burundi.
[00:49:09] Speaker B: She does. And she. It's very heartbreaking, actually. I think she, you know, one of the, one of the saddest things I've ever seen with Maggie, and in some ways there aren't that many sad things you see with Maggie. But I had her in class, I think, in 2017, she was visiting. I took her to a class I was teaching.
And her travel document is a UN issued travel document. It's not a passport. Right. Because she is formerly a refugee sponsored by Luxembourg. And so she brings it out, it looks like a passport, it's light blue, has a UN stamp on the front.
And she's showing it to students like, this is now me. And at that point, she'd been a refugee for about two years.
And then she flips to a page, and on that page it says something to the effect of, you know, she's allowed to travel anywhere in the world except Burundi. And it's stamped right in the passport of, like, this takes you anywhere except here.
And that's. You just see the sorrow. Like, like. And that was 2017, when at that point she was just starting to, I think, to think that this, this had been two years and this could be a long, long time. Now it's been 10 years. And, and there's no, I mean, there's. Yes, she desires to return, I think, because Maggie always believes the impossible is possible. She, she still thinks she will return.
Far be it from me to disagree, given everything that she's, that she's accomplished in the face of people who were telling her she couldn't do it. But the political context of the moment in Burundi doesn't bode well for return. I mean, she has been convicted in absentia of being a terrorist and among other things, and given a life sentence plus 20 years. She likes to, to, to joke that apparently the extra 20 years is so they can punish her in the next life too.
And, and so, you know, it's, it's hard to imagine, but that's me.
What would have to change politically in Burundi for her to actually be able to go home? But, but absolutely, she, she still wants to do it.
[00:51:11] Speaker A: David, I'm going to ask you to help in the. This conversation in a similar way to how you ended the book, and that is by talking about the concept of Ubuntu.
I think what felt very remarkable about this discussion of the concept, which is not new to me, it may be maybe new to some listeners, is the emphasis, emphasis on Ubuntu not leaving anyone out.
And we mentioned it earlier with Maggie's critique of the genocide memorials in Rwanda. How would it feel to be a Hutu and show up at these places? Is that reconciliation?
When I see this and encounter this discussion, I feel hope for the oppressed and also hope for the oppressor. And I think, similarly to other things that we've talked about in Maggie's life, this is not a natural inclination to want to include in a hopeful narrative for a present and a future those who have been the oppressor.
How did you encounter this concept with Maggie?
[00:52:50] Speaker B: Yeah, so it's interesting because for most of the time that I've been around her, since 2009, I didn't encounter the concept with Maggie until just the last couple of years. And then it was all in the context of the work that she was starting to do in a school she was building in Kigali, with the goal being that it would be an ib, you know, International Baccalaureate school all the way through high school. Right now it's just a primary school and maybe middle school moving toward that, where she's been trying to integrate Ubuntu into the curriculum of the school and, and more robustly, actually, than what she's been doing with vocational training in Muhammad refugee camp over in the eastern reaches of Rwanda, which is now 50, 60,000 refugees, predominantly Burundians.
Children now born in the camp are 10 years old. This is everything they know. And so there she has quite robust. I just had some staff spend three weeks with her and some Duke and Belmont University students with Maggie in Rwanda in the refugee camp, and they came back and really reported that the actual way in which they are pedagogically trying to instill Ubuntu in the refugees is really quite remarkable.
So I didn't encounter for a long time. And then when I did encounter it, I didn't like it, because for me, I've always taken Ubuntu whenever, at least it crops up in an Ameri context as a kind of platitudinous thing that. A word that people throw around that we, you know, I. I am. Because we are. And I've always found it to be just not that interesting and worse just is a kind of a concept that gets adopted by people who. Who need something to adopt.
And so when I first encountered it, just last summer, really, when I was in Rwanda with Maggie and she was showing me the school and we're in the refugee camp, and she was really starting to talk about it, I. My first reaction was, oh, no, no. Like, you've been corrupted by the West. And so I actually had to do a kind of deep dive at that point into Ubuntu myself. And I do this in the book to just try to, like, okay, what's the history of the concept?
It is, of course, an incredibly African concept and not, you know, and Pan African concept.
And so then I, you know, then I became warmer to the idea that this would be Maggie's thing because. Because it really belongs to Africans in the way that it doesn't belong to the rest of us.
But still.
And I try to do this in the book still, if you go and read the way in which Mandela talked about it or Tutu talked about it, there's still something that Maggie adds to that. And so I try. She still will use again what I take as a very platitudinous phrase, which is I am because we are with. Which is one of the ways it gets translated.
So she'll still say that, but she doesn't just say that. Then she says what I take to be more profound things about what it means. So she will say, if I'm watching television and I'm seeing human beings somewhere else in the world dying, I'm dying, too. And when Maggie says that, she says it again with this way in which she pulls you in. And so it gets to be a really deep, rich thing when Maggie's talking about it. And then what I realized as I was, was I was working on this, and I actually texted one of my Burundian friends to make sure I was right. Is in Kundi, the word for generosity is ubuntu, or one of the words for generosity, right? And so then I realized, like, if Maggie and I had been talking in Karundi, like, through all of the conversations we've had, Ubuntu would have been there all the time. Right. I would have just been bumping into it everywhere.
And so it's only in recent years that she has pulled out what is very much her Burundi African, and she's pulled it up into English as Ubuntu, which then has a history out of South Africa.
But for her, it's rich and deep and contextualized in ways that I think are quite profound.
And I mean, since I'm on that topic, I also should say, you know, I have always talked to Maggie in English.
My Karundi is non existent and my French is poor.
Her first language is Karundi. Her second language is really French. And then, and then English is, is. Is coming along, right? So everybody has told me that, God, you have to learn French because if you, if you listen to Maggie in French, it is just astounding. And I'm like, well, she's pretty astounding in English, so I'm not sure what French would be like. So I do think it's important, like, to. To remember that everything that I say about Maggie, all the quotes I use from Maggie are, are none of. Not actually the way in which she speaks in her native language or in French. And so it's probably from everybody. I think it's weaker because I've had to work in English.
[00:57:47] Speaker A: Gosh, David, I could continue this conversation on and on.
The book was fabulous and I appreciate you introducing me to Maggie in this way.
The name of the book again is. Is Love Made Me an Inventor. The Story of Maggie Barranquitse, Humanitarian, genocide survivor, Citizen Without Borders. And I'll put the link to where folks can grab this in the show notes. Yeah, I just want to say thank you again so much, David, for this time, for this conversation, for the elaboration on so many of the stories that I found to be profound and wonderful in the past book. And really, again, thank you so much for your introduction to Maggie. For the rest of us who will probably not meet her in real life, we are incredibly grateful to know these parts of her story.
[00:58:46] Speaker B: Well, thank you too. I appreciate, you know, as we said before you started recording like this, really, though I wrote the book, this is really Maggie's story. And I think that, you know, my, my hope really is that more and more people will learn her story and be inspired by her story to act in certain way.
Very few of us will ever become like Maggie, but she could inspire us to really live in the world differently in ways that the world really needs right now.
So I appreciate you picking up the book and thinking enough of it to invite me to the podcast.
[00:59:22] Speaker A: Thanks again.
The links for all the resources mentioned in today's episode can be found in the show Notes, music and podcast production by Seth Busetti. Be sure to give us a review on itunes and subscribe at your favorite podcast listening app. You can also Visit
[email protected].
[00:59:48] Speaker B: Ram.
