Awakin with Deo Niyizonkiza: Public Health and Peace Visionary

Awakin Calls is an initiative of ServiceSpace, a global, all volunteer-run community dedicated to inner change and outer service. In Awakin Calls, we engage in deep conversations with individuals gently shaking the world, and inspiring us to transformative action.

Healing What Remains

A young man arrives in the Big City with two hundred dollars in his pocket, no English at all, and memories of horror so fresh that he sometimes confuses past and present. When Deo first told me about his beginnings in New York, I had a simple thought: “I would not have survived.” And then, two years later, he enrolls in an Ivy League university.  -- Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder on Deo Niyizonkiza, in his book, Strength in What Remains

Following a childhood witnessing unspeakable horrors from the genocide in Burundi, Deo founded and today leads Village Health Works, a nonprofit world-class medical clinic in Burundi. Today, this nonprofit organization has added a world-class school, and as an entirely community-driven health and development organization, also a culture of renewal. When Deo had first proposed this idea to the villagers, they responded at once by bringing their machetes, pickaxes, and other tools to break ground. “So the tools that had been used by some to kill,” Deo explains, “were now being used to build an infrastructure that would be for their own community.”

Deo is also the honoree of numerous awards including Unsung Heroes of Compassion presented by the Dalai Lama, such honors interest him only inasmuch as they generate interest in his clinic and in Burundi.

"Where there is health, there is hope," he says.