Who Is Tracy Kidder's Strength In What Remains?

“Strength In What Remains” by Tracy Kidder, might seem a companion piece to his best-selling ”Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World” (2003). This story starts out as Farmer, whose foundation Partner’s in Health has reinvented health care delivery in some of the world’s poorest regions, figures briefly in this new book as a mentor to its central figure, Deogratias Niyizonkiza. Kidder in fact met Deo in Boston while researching Farmer’s history, though three years elapsed before he began investigating Deo’s own dramatic story. Deo escaped from the 1993-1994 ethnic genocides of Burundi and Rwanda. He reinvented himself as an American immigrant, and, inspired by Partner’s in Health, returned
to Burundi to launch his own public health initiative, Village Health Works. Deo led Kidder into what he termed “the land of Joe Conrad. This is the heart of darkness right here.” Deo’s painstaking and painful recovery of self after surviving the nightmare of history forms Kidder’s abiding subject. The book’s title derives from Williams Wordsworth's famous lines from “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” included in the book’s epigraph. The quote states “We will grieve not,rather find strength in what remains behind.” Though Deo’s six-month flight from Africa’s killing fields stands at both the literal and the figurative center of Strength in What Remains”, his resilient spirit frames and contains the horror. Kidder situates the sections recounting genocide and its aftermath as flashbacks within an account of the 2006 trip he and Deo made to Burundi. During this trip, Deo decided to stop retracing his earlier trauma in favour of building a clinic in his family’s new village, in Kayanza. So that at least one Burundian community could begin to move away, as he had, from the paralyzing weight of the past.