As part of Proskauer’s focus on improving the wellbeing of and opportunities for women in Africa, we formed a partnership with Village Health Works, an organization that provides healthcare, social services, and education to the people of Burundi and East Africa.

The organization’s founder and CEO, Deogratias Niyizonkiza, was born in Burundi but fled to the U.S. in 1994 to escape civil war. Deo arrived in New York City nearly penniless and speaking no English but, remarkably, he made his way through Columbia University, the Harvard School of Public Health and Dartmouth Medical School. With his native Burundi always on his mind, Deo returned in 2005 to rally the people and resources necessary to spark new hope in a historically devastated and depressed region.

Deo recently visited with Proskauer senior counsel Chantel Febus, and shared the story of his amazing journey and the vital work being done by Village Health Works in Burundi.

You have an amazing life story, written about by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author in a book entitled Strength in WhatRemains. Can you tell us about Burundi – your childhood and overall experience there?

One of my earliest memories was my first day of school in Burundi. The classroom was packed with children – but before the end of the school year the classroom was half empty. Why? Some children died from totally preventable diseases in a country where there’s no access to care. Others simply went back home because their parents were sick and they – at the age of six – had to care for siblings and parents. And others simply ran away. So it was very hard in these kinds of conditions to think about what the future had to offer us. It was a life of fear.

But, there also was a joy because many people in the community would tell you, ‘We are here, we love you, and you are not alone.’ A child belonged to everyone in the community, not just one parent or one family. And that kept some of us, including myself, moving forward, with a desire to try to do something, learn something that could shift these dehumanizing conditions into the ones that favor life. And that is what led me into medicine.

How did those experiences impact what you’re doing now with Village Health Works and how it serves the community?

It’s normal for someone like me, who was lucky to survive, to ask himself: Can I get the knowledge and the power to change these conditions? So Village Health Works was always there in my head without a name. When I came to the United States and after surviving all the odds, homelessness and trauma, I met a lot of wonderful people from this very island, who lifted me up and brought my dreams of childhood back to life, and I started working again.

So in 2005 I went back to visit Burundi, eleven years after I had left. I knew that Burundi had suffered so much, but I had no idea that hospitals had become places where patients will go to watch themselves die. When I came back to the United States, I couldn’t remove all the images and the stories and the patients I saw suffering, dying without medication, without anyone around. So after a few months I went back to Burundi and started mobilizing community members who were dying in the villages or in hospitals, to try to bring decency where it had been lost. Many were women who have lived a very difficult life, both before the war and after the war, and they have already been mobilized, and this is why we’ve been talking about building a Women’s Health Pavilion to save mothers’ lives – many of them have been dying in childbirth.

So, we started with the community in Burundi, but when I shared the stories with my friends in the United States, and students, it became a community-to-community effort and we began building. So, now with Village Health Works we’re focusing very hard on building the healthcare system so that it can become a model for the country. We’re also building education, because you cannot really separate the two in a country where generations have lost the sense of education, have lost what makes us all human.

Can you paint a picture for us of what life is like in Burundi today?

The real issue is the poverty. Think about a country where 80% of the population lives on less than a dollar a day. How do you find hope? Think about a country that went through hell on earth for decades, when children should be in school, but instead are running around. Where is the future? This is a country where people have been proclaimed the hungriest on the planet. Whose fault is that? It’s society’s fault. Whose responsibility is that? It’s the responsibility of all of us. I truly believe that with the humanity, under the same sky, we can confront all these challenges, all these problems, together.

What about infrastructure and technology in Burundi?

The infrastructure that we have is not the kind you would want to honor human dignity. So, we are working very hard to build a hospital that offers dignity. Build a school where the children can learn without having to worry about where they go when it’s pouring rain, hiding their notebooks under their shirts. So, infrastructure is something that is made by people, and when people have a passion, the compassion and the skills, we can make it. It’s not that the resources are unavailable, it’s how we utilize them, and that’s what we really need to understand. Building infrastructure is not expensive compared to loss in livelihood and childhood, and the consequences of that.

Can you tell us about the progress you’ve made?

We have quite a lot to be happy about in our community, in Burundi, at Village Health Works. Just this summer the people of Kigutu made a road from the campus all the way to the river where we are building a hydropower plant. Machines could not reach the rural area, but within 29 days they created this entire road. That is a testimony of what happens when you talk to people, bring them together, share the knowledge, encourage them, and say, ‘This is what we need – who’s going to do that? All of us.’ And that is the power of community resilience.

We also are continuing to work very hard to build staff housing so that when we build the Women’s Health Pavilion and the Kigutu Academy, the teachers will have a decent place where they can rest or be with their family members or friends, and do the work they need to do. We opened an early childhood development program, because if we don’t start from when they are very young, we miss the window of opportunity to actually give them something that can grow. It’s almost like planting a seed – fertile land, fertilizers, watering, waiting, and you can expect to get nice fruit. If you do that halfway through, you get nothing.

The greatest achievement for us has been to see how former enemies not only became collaborators to build villages, to build their own communities, to bring decency where it has been lost, but how they became great friends through the work they do. Also, we have seen how resilience within that community is unshakable, how this community sees each other as one, to not only rebuild the community but also to inspire others to do the same thing. So you can see how the bottom-up can actually change the talk. And that is what we’re going to do, to build the country together.