Deogratias "Deo" Niyizonkiza, who escaped genocide in Burundi and later returned to found a health care organization there, will be the featured speaker Tuesday, Aug. 30, as Bluffton University welcomes the class of 2015 to campus at its annual opening convocation.
With faculty in regalia looking on, about 280 new first-year and transfer students will be introduced during the ceremony, which begins at 10:45 a.m. in Founders Hall.
Niyizonkiza's presentation will launch Bluffton's 2011-12 civic engagement theme, "Public Health: Promoting Wellness for Self and Community." Each year, the university focuses on a significant contemporary issue that is related to its mission and becomes the subject of cross-disciplinary exploration.
For incoming first-year students, that exploration begins with a common summer reading. Niyizonkiza's story is told in this year's book, Strength in What Remains, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder.
Dr. Sally Weaver Sommer, Bluffton's vice president and dean of academic affairs, said she is pleased that Niyizonkiza will kick off this year's civic engagement theme. "The inspiring story of his commitment to meeting the public health needs of the people of Burundi will help students understand the importance of this year's theme in meeting the needs of people around the world," she said.
Surviving a massacre at the Burundian hospital where he was a third-year medical school intern, Niyizonkiza fled to New York in 1994, arriving with no contacts and speaking no English. With help from new friends, he overcame hurdles-low-paying work as a grocery-store delivery boy, illness and homelessness-and eventually enrolled at Columbia University, where he studied biochemistry and philosophy.
After graduating from Columbia, Niyizonkiza entered Harvard University's School of Public Health, where he met and worked with Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health, a nonprofit, health care organization focused on the poor.
Dartmouth Medical School was next for Niyizonkiza, who subsequently took a hiatus to found Burundi-based Village Health Works on the principle that all people, including the most impoverished, deserve access to quality health care in a dignified environment.
The organization operates a clinic in rural Burundi that has seen more than 55,000 patients-the majority of them women and their children-since opening its doors in December 2007. Niyizonkiza is now a U.S. citizen, and has returned to medical school, but remains involved in building Village Health Works into a model for Burundi and beyond.
