TORONTO — “We somehow have to come up with a culture of peace, which we all participate in establishing,” a Rwandan genocide survivor told a group of Grade 9 students at the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto’s Vaughan campus last week.
Grade 9 student Alex Magod presents Rwandan genocide survivor Patrick Sharangabo with a quote from Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel: “On three things the world is sustained: on truth, on judgment, and on peace.” [Frances Kraft photo]
Patrick Sharangabo spoke to the students at the invitation of Jamie Cohen, an English teacher and filmmaker who has made a short film inspired by his life.
Cohen told The CJN that he recently finished teaching a unit on mythology that included study on what a hero is. Sharangabo – who, in 2006, received a New Pioneers award for community activism – is Cohen’s “real-life hero,” Cohen said.
Sharangabo completed a BA in political science, African studies and aboriginal studies at the University of Toronto while working full time, after immigrating here alone as a 16-year-old. Currently, he works full time and volunteers with young Rwandans including genocide survivors.
But between April and July 1994, the year the Grade 9 TanenbaumCHATstudents were born, Sharangabo was a 12-year-old boy whose father and uncle were among the 800,000 Rwandans killed.
Cohen asked his students to think about what real-life lessons they could take from Sharangabo’s life, and what they could change in themselves to become role models for those who know them.
Sharangabo told the students he is not a hero, just a human being. He hoped the students could relate to his story because he was close to their age at the time.
“When a society turns against you, you can’t go and see your principal and tell him what’s wrong,” he told them. “It’s a systemic thing,” he said, noting the similarities between the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust.
“Anyone had the right to abuse you, even to abuse your father or mother,” he said.
Knowing that a genocide was imminent, Sharangabo’s parents sent his siblings to stay with relatives, and the rest of the family went into hiding. Once they were discovered, his father was killed “instantly.”
Sharangabo was taken outside by a former classmate to the street, where others were being killed. He was struck with a machete in the head, arm and leg and thrown into a mass grave, drifting in and out of consciousness from blood loss until he woke up, saw the moon, and realized he was still alive. He managed to make his way out of the grave and eventually reconnected with his mother.
The time immediately following the genocide was the most difficult he had ever faced, he said, walking past skeletons on the same streets where the atrocities had occurred. His mother decided it would be good for him to leave the country.
When Sharangabo left for North America, he realized he was going to live in “another world, with happy people and ignorant people – the regular type of world, but they didn’t share where I was coming from.”
In a way, he had to “construct a new human being,” he said. Educationally, he was motivated by the thought of his peers who died without having the opportunity to pursue their goals. “That was my war, to stay in school and become that which the others could have become.”
He described himself now as “happy, for sure,” his words backed up by his smile and the rapport he seemed to create easily with the students. Survivors need to have hope in order to move on, he said. “As things get worse, you’ll always notice a sign of hope, and that’s what guides you all the way there.”
The knowledge that “there is no worse place” than where he had been also helped him face challenges as a teenage immigrant on his own, he said.
Genocide is a global issue, said Sharangabo. It is “like a hurricane that moves from one site to another.
“It’s up to me and you, and all of us, to establish ‘Never Again’ that has a real meaning,” he said. “What can we do to make sure genocide doesn’t continue?”