A cou­ple weeks ago, I attended a very inter­est­ing event, one that pro­voked two thoughts:

1) There is always, always two sides of a story and

2) We need to use resources around us — beyond what we have at hand in order to learn

This event was in UBC as part of the Inter­na­tional Week celebrations:

To pro­vide some back­ground: (Taken from event description)

Mr. Paul Rus­esabag­ina was the man­ager of the Sabena Hôtel des Mille Collines, and shel­tered hun­dreds of Tut­sis and mod­er­ate Hutus peo­ple for a hun­dred days using all avail­able resources to him.  His coura­geous efforts thwarted bands of geno­ci­dal mili­tia while Rwanda descended into out­right geno­cide and civil war, and was cel­e­brated in the Hol­ly­wood movie pro­duc­tion, “Hotel Rwanda”.

A recip­i­ent of numer­ous inter­na­tional awards, includ­ing the Wal­len­berg Medal and the Pres­i­den­tial Medal of Free­dom, Mr. Rus­esabag­ina is a pow­er­ful speaker with a story of hero­ism and human­ity in inhu­mane con­di­tions.  In addi­tion to his expe­ri­ences dur­ing and after the Rwan­dan geno­cide, Mr. Rus­esabag­ina will share his insights into the nature of the con­flict, the fail­ure of the West to stop it, and the chal­lenges of reconciliation.

The event started out with a quick intro­duc­tion by Brian Sul­li­van and quickly pro­ceeded to Paul Rusesabagina’s speech itself. I won’t go into details of the speech, which was an account of his expe­ri­ences of the Rwan­dan geno­cide and what went down in Hotel Rwanda. It was incred­i­ble hear­ing his accounts first hand, but the real expe­ri­ence cam dur­ing the Q&A period. Prof. Michael Byers was the mod­er­a­tor for the session.

Three things occured dur­ing the Q&A that took me com­pletely by surprise:

1) There was a sub­stan­tial amount of peo­ple that are Rwan­dan geno­cide refugees that were present. I had no idea that event of this event man­aged to reach past the UBC com­mu­nity, which was impressive.

2) The ques­tions regard­ing com­par­isons of South Africa and Rwanda’s econ­omy was very much unex­pected, con­sid­er­ing the dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal, cul­tural and eco­nomic con­di­tions of both countries.

3) The response towards Paul Rusesabagina’s speech was cen­tered around his account­abil­ity and actions of Hotel Rwanda.

Need­less to say, due to time con­straints, only 3–4 ques­tions were answered and the ses­sion ended. How­ever, sev­eral Rwan­dan com­mu­nity rep­re­sen­ta­tives spoke up on their ver­sion of Paul Rusesabagina’s actions, ques­tion­ing his motives, finan­cial account­abil­ity as well as alliances dur­ing the geno­cide. They had the Chan Cen­tre riv­eted with accounts of their per­sonal sto­ries of their sur­vival and encoun­ters with the military.

I have been to numer­ous events at the Chan but this was the first one that I have ever expe­ri­enced such a strong out­come and dis­cus­sion after. Stu­dents were gath­er­ing out­side the Chan around these Rwan­dan geno­cide sur­vivors who were engag­ing in more per­sonal con­ver­sa­tion about their expe­ri­ences and there was buzz in the atmos­phere about new­found knowledge.

My Main Take­away: Paul Rus­esabag­ina has been potrayed by Hol­ly­wood as a hero and revered for his coura­geous efforts dur­ing the geno­cide. How­ever, the dis­cus­sion at the Chan cen­ter which ques­tioned his alliances, finan­cial account­abil­ity, and actual self-preservation efforts. This  has made me realise that there are always two sides to a story, no mat­ter how well know one side is. It is our respon­si­bil­ity to always be aware of the other side.

I leave you with a phe­nom­e­nal TED talk by Chi­ma­manda Adiechi telling the dan­ger of a sin­gle story. Because our lives and cul­tures are com­posed of many over­lap­ping stories, if we hear only a sin­gle story about another per­son or coun­try, we risk a crit­i­cal misunderstanding.