Rwanda Survivor Inspired By Gen Dallaire Becomes Padre

[Cpl Kendall]

CTV.CA

Chaplain to use difficult past as healing tool

Updated Thu. Aug. 2 2007 3:52 PM ET

Canadian Press

MONTREAL -- Capt. Charles Deogratias remembers that his first dream of freedom came to him in the form of long-haired women dressed in white walking amid a squalid refugee camp in Tanzania.

Deogratias was just five, but he has never been able to shake the memory of those nurses who braved infection and disease to immunize the camp where he was raised.

It's an image the Canadian Forces chaplain recalls again as he prepares to take part in the military mission in Afghanistan.

"I dreamed about seeing those nurses again," he said in an interview ahead of his departure for Kandahar this weekend.

"I dreamed of leaving, of going somewhere. I can say now it wasn't just a dream, the dream has come true."

The vision of the nurses set in motion a remarkable series of events which are marked by the violence in his ancestral Rwanda, yet also marked by the goodwill of strangers. All of it gives Deogratias, 44, a unique perspective about the work facing Canadian troops in Afghanistan.

"Everybody who doesn't know the absence of freedom, doesn't know how it feels to be free," he said from his home in Quebec City.

Before leaving for Afghanistan, young Quebec soldiers of the Royal 22nd Regiment spoke often about helping rebuild and secure a country as they tried to counter rising antiwar sentiment in the province.

Deogratias was schooled under a tree, didn't use a pen until he was 16 and didn't wear shoes until he was 20. He has watched a friend get eaten by a crocodile, saved his father from being attacked by a lion and fled the spectre of the Rwandan genocide.

He can only shrug at the controversy over the deployment.

"Whether the mission succeeds or not there is something we can be sure of, we will change the life of someone," he says. "It can be 20 years later. The people who came to help us (in Tanzania) don't even know that I survived.

"And here I am now participating among others to bring hope to the hopeless."

Deogratias left the refugee camp when he was 20 and ended up at a youth mission in Kenya. There he met a young volunteer from Colorado who sent him $60 when she returned home.

That he received the money at all through a postal system that often relieves recipients of the burden of opening their own mail, Deogratias considers a small miracle.

He used the lowly sum to take college classes in Kenya, and did well enough to earn a scholarship to study in the United States.

After graduating from a seminary in Denver as a Presbyterian minister, Deogratias returned to Africa in 1993 with the intention of teaching in Rwanda. But as the country spiralled toward genocide, he decided to leave again and eventually ended up in Canada.

It was another chance meeting, this time with retired Lt.-Gen. Romeo Dallaire in 1997, that prompted Deogratias to join the military.

"When genocide was happening in my country and people were being killed, Dallaire stood to plead the case of the people of Rwanda," he says, adding he was deeply affected upon learning of Dallaire's subsequent mental anguish over being powerless to stop the killing.

"I thought of becoming a chaplain to help people like him who come from a mission hurting because they went to do a good thing."

Throughout the remarkable series events that make up the chaplain's life, there emerges a sense of the power that one person, or even a single deed, can have on the lives of others.

It's a message that Deogratias promises to impart to the soldiers under his charge.

"The sense of this mission is doing good things and we have to keep on doing them," he says. "So even when we lose our friends and comrades, we have to carry on the mission they have died for."

While he does share some of the apprehension of his fellow soldiers over the dangers facing Canadian troops in Afghanistan, Deogratias likes to refer to the "privilege" of taking part in the mission. In many ways, he sees it as a chance to use his experiences as a guide for others.

"I want to go not because I am immune to tragedy, but because I can say I have been there," he says. "I know how it feels to be at a crossroads, I know how it feels to hurt."

This is the first Rwanda survivor that I'm aware of that has joined the CF and he credits Gen Dallaire as his inspiration. Undoubtably he will be a great assest to the troops in Afghanistan as he has already walked in a warzone and will have experianced similiar feelings. He'll also be able to connect with the locals a little easier.