Born To Dream: An Odyssey from Rwanda to China and the United States

By Irihamye

Born to Dream: An Odyssey from Rwanda to China and the United States.

From his childhood in Rwanda to China and the United States, Phocas Irihamye's life has been one long and dynamic journey. It has been a journey predicated upon adversity and triumph, but above all, grounded in the power of dreams!

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Phocas N Irihamye
• Release date: Aug 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088265604

Book preview

Introduction

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.

As a young boy, from the Land of a Thousand Hills, Rwanda, to the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, I made it my goal to dream every day, and to go higher and higher. This is a book about dreaming and so much more.

But first of all, what does it mean to dream? A dream may seem like something abstract. Au contraire. A dream is something unique, yet universal, something that can be tooled to your own experiences and worldview. The world is built upon dreamers, in spite of all the negativity that permeates our media and daily discourse. Martin Luther King dreamed that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

Mandela dreamed of an Africa which is in peace with itself. These dreams were big, and their reach was universal. Nevertheless, these dynamic figures lived them as their own on a daily basis. These heroes did not reach these dreams overnight. They set goals, made allies, and delivered greater good, sometimes at the expense of their own lives.

Let us consider, as another example, this quote from Victor Hugo: If you don’t build castles in the air, you won’t build anything on the ground.

Here, Hugo inspires us to dream first and dream high. As both a writer and philosopher, Hugo achieved what few of us can fathom. From his romantic writings to his political ambitions, his achievements and contributions to human civilization are amazing. In his novel, Les Misérables, Hugo calls out for social justice for every human being. It is a clarion call for basic rights and freedom, including the abolition of capital punishment. Another great quote from Hugo that reflects this ethos of social justice is: Only one slave on Earth is enough to dishonour the freedom of all men. So the abolition of slavery is, at this hour, the supreme goal of the thinkers.

Many of his works also inspired music, like the opera Rigoletto and the musicals Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris.

Hugo wanted every human to achieve their potential sans the constraint of social norms. He inspired me to work hard, strive for excellence, and to love what I do. His life of success and struggle helped me realize that I might not achieve everything I attempted. Nevertheless, I have to dream and push boundaries.

Hugo is but one of my many heroes.

Another great quote comes from Marie Curie: All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.

Through this quote, Marie Curie demonstrated the joy derived from discovery, which can push us to dream even more continuously throughout our lives.

I used to, and still, call Marie Curie a big sister. She became my role model to thrive scientifically, going back to middle school. Her quote here emphasizes how important it is to dream, maintain the dream, and go out there and make it a reality. Her work on radium and her sacrificing her own life for it are testaments to how a dream is a journey. Given her own background, this is even more bittersweet. She was unable to attend university in Poland, being female. She experienced depression. She lost her husband, Pierre, after a mere eleven years of marriage.

Yet, in her life she attended the Sorbonne. She and Pierre both won their first Nobel prize for their work on radioactivity. And even after Pierre’s death, she continued their work and won a second Nobel prize in chemistry—for her discovery of new elements and radium samples. It was through this work that she developed aplastic anemia cancer and subsequently died.

But, of course, her dream and achievements have not.

Curie’s hours of late-night work have inspired so many scientists, young and old, to dedicate their lives to something you love. When my daughters experience setbacks, I remind them of Marie Curie’s work, so they may recharge and continue their journeys.

And what does dreaming mean to me?

To me, to dream is to conceive, to imagine, to ideate, to envision, to picture, and to fantasize. At a young age, I fantasized about the future I desired. The world I wanted to live in. The future me. As I write, I invite you to join this journey. Together, we can discover the secret sauce of making our dreams come true. But we need to dream first!

With these conceptions of dreams to ruminate upon, let us now leap into my dream!

***

This book is a story of that dream, but also a story of a journey from Africa to China to the United States, back to China, and ultimately back to the United States. The first true steppingstone was getting a scholarship to study in China, the culmination of a good Catholic education from the Lasallian Brothers. Along this path, I received a degree in electrical engineering from Zhejiang University in 1994, worked in China for four years, and ended up moving to Charlotte, North Carolina, to attend graduate school and work for Solectron. In 2004, I left Solectron to join Lexmark and remained in this new position for sixteen years (four and a half of which were spent as an expat). I ultimately joined Microsoft in January 2020, a dynamic journey that still continues.

In discussing the ideas of dreams and achievement, I will touch upon them in many dimensions. First, I will discuss the challenges of being a stranger in a strange land. I will highlight the importance of taking quantum leaps, leaving your home country, studying abroad, and learning new languages—all while adapting to new cultures and coming out on top. In addition, I will highlight my ability to thrive in the professional world of business and engineering in China, along with its inherent challenges. But I shall also discuss the importance of good business relationships as foundations for success. These are salient lessons, regardless of your own background or expertise.

My story will also cover my life in the US, and its own inherent joys and challenges, as I strive to take that dream to the next level. I formed a family and fathered high-achieving children, who inherited their father’s dream to think big. This dream manifested itself in their own triumphs, namely ending up at Notre Dame and Oxford.

My story also covers the dream in terms of my evolving career and how I excelled in corporate. But it also offered a chance to give back through coaching, mentoring, and networking, while inculcating the values of good ethics. These can show you how to leave a strong legacy, both in the office and at home.

***

Now I look back on all this from my present Microsoft position. This place is big and beautiful, in terms of the landscape, the building design, and the artwork. But most importantly it is beautiful in terms of the culture and the people who work here. Anywhere on campus, I feel the sense of welcome and belonging. The One Microsoft culture with its particular values resonate with my dream: Be human, there’s no room for cynics, fail fast, be relentless, and grab an oar. I feel this compatibility in every meeting, in every encounter, and in problem-solving, whether locally in Redmond, Washington, or engaging in communications with Chinese, Israeli, Mexican, and various European counterparts and clientele. I and my fellow Microsoft employees even call on customers and suppliers to embody the dream. Microsoft gives me a canvas where I can paint whatever comes to mind. It makes me realize my dream as an African, a manager, an employee, a businessman, and a professional engineer all at once. I have a chance to apply all my skills and background in one shot. I can speak all my four languages in one hour, thanks to the diversity initiative that has representation from all four nationalities and languages, including French, Chinese, Rwandan, and English, of course. It is a beautiful rainbow where every color is bright and brilliant.

It is a place to dream and be what you’re meant to be. An abiding dream.  However, you do not have to be at Microsoft to live your dream. Many smaller organizations do provide similar platforms.

My previous companies, Lexmark and Solectron, offered valuable experiences, but Microsoft takes diversity and inclusion to the next level. It is an intrinsic part of the company DNA, part of the company reward system and company overall metrics. It just wants you to be you, the whole you. Lexmark, while having a culture of inclusion and respect, lacked an open, dynamic diversity initiative.

There were also no clear metrics, such as the actual percentages of African American and Latinos in the company, diversification goals for the next one to five years, and measures taken to achieve those goals of a diverse workforce. If such metrics existed, they were not made public per Microsoft’s model, nor did they serve as part of the compensation system.

At Solectron, to be frank, there were a few black leaders, including my second line manager, Jimmy. I loved the company’s technical learning orientation. I also learned a great deal about printed circuit boards, manufacturing quality and process, as well as test engineering, the cornerstone of my career journey.

But Microsoft is truly a dream!

But what a long and fascinating journey this dream has taken, in so many forms. And it is not over yet. I am dreaming of continuing to climb the corporate ladder to realize my full potential that could even lead to general manager over the next few years. Day by day, piece by piece, I am developing the skillsets and span of control that will get me there. Someday, I hope to share these advances with you, dear readers. And I hope those advances will subsequently inspire you, just as this book can.

The bottom line is if you’re looking for advice on how to dream big and thrive abroad in China or elsewhere, whether studying or just traveling, this is the right book.

If you’re a manager, a team lead, or a program manager for international teams, including China, the Philippines, and India, this book will help you in understanding cultural awareness. It will help you, and most importantly, your team, deliver the best.

If you are a new immigrant and you are looking to raise a successful family and launch a career in the US, this book is for you. If you are American looking for tips on raising academic-savvy kids to send to Ivy League and other top-tier schools, this book will help as well. Whether you’re a new parent or a parent of adolescents, you will benefit.

If you are a college student or in the nascent stages of a career, this book will unleash your dreams and show you how to navigate corporate life and climb the ladder to success.

But most importantly, if you want to dream and achieve, regardless of background, you’re in the right place.

Let’s take a dive and dream big!

Chapter One

-

My Early Years

1974–August 1983

Never stop dreaming, was a constant reminder from my mom, Maria, when I was growing up. It was akin to my daily nourishment from her. To that end, she wanted me to constantly remember it and keep pushing boundaries regardless of barriers. Thankfully, I was receptive to this nourishment. My mom told me that I was born in the middle of the day, at around 11:00AM, and that from then on, I had grown up as an enthusiastic and optimistic child; the first thing I saw in life was light. The light, as it turns out, had been my default state of mind. I never saw darkness as anything other than the absence of light. I never saw the night as anything other than the day in a temporarily dormant state, hence missing the ever-existing light. 

With this can-do attitude and constant dreaming of personal betterment, I concentrated a lifetime of energy on a positive focal point, seeking to conduct my business with a positive, optimistic attitude. I strove to fortify myself with a will capable of overcoming any obstacles. On top of all that, I dedicated my life to education to set myself and those around me free—free from the constraint of limited resources of my country, free from poverty for anyone around me, free from wishing and not having. It might be a wish for a good book, a wish for a trip to a place I have never been, a wish for a drink, or just a plain daydream. The bottom line is I want all my wishes to be part of the dream, and I want to realize that dream and inspire others to do the same. 

The following story will share with you those happy moments, the challenges, and how I turned them into good times and more happy memories. I will share my Rwandan early years, my Chinese education and youth and expat experience, as well as my prominent rise into corporate American ranks to become an engineering director at Microsoft.

Yes, I was born to dream, and as you will see, I remain a dreamer!

Let’s start at the very beginning. It truly is a great place to start.

***

Made to be happy, and ready for it, I was born in a small but beautiful country called Rwanda, the Switzerland of Africa, with a win-win mindset. I was a middle child in a family of five with all the advantages that came with it. This included an older sister who at some point in our life acted as a mother to me and a young brother who acted like a son. I was born on September 23, 1968, in the north part of Rwanda, a province named Ruhengeri, not far from the National Park of Birunga, home to the famous mountain gorilla. The famous movie Gorillas in the Mist by Michael Apted was shot when I was ten. Strangely enough my siblings and I were all born in September, exactly eight years apart from the consecutive child. I was born to dream for challenges, ready for new hope, ready to be optimistic, ready to do more, ready for fun and ready for happiness!

Rwanda is a very small country in the center of Africa, only a few degrees south of the equator. It is bordered by Uganda in the north, Tanzania in the east, Burundi in the south and the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly known as Zaire, in the west. It is called the Nation of A Thousand Hills because of its elevated land. With a surface area of around 26,000 square kilometers and a population of more than 10 million, it is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Its brutal civil war in 1990–1994 notwithstanding, it was a peaceful country where honey and milk flow from nature. Rwanda is a temperate highland climate without extreme heat or cold. Like many tropical countries, the rain varies contingent upon season, but the temperature is even across the year. With its small size, overpopulation, along with the fact that it relies primarily on agriculture to survive, the country's resources are very limited. Only a small percentage of the population can make a decent living. I am lucky to be among them. This has fueled not only my particular behavior, but the behavior of all Rwandans who wish for a good life for themselves and their families. The most obvious route to success is education, a steppingstone for those who dare to dream.

I started school early at the age of five, as I was following my older sister Laurence in whatever she did. I had a couple of years head start, and that would set the tone for my life, being ahead in everything I envisioned. In terms of knowledge, I was a second grader before I was of school age. I could converse in French because I was catching up with my sister’s homework. I was a nice pet to her, and listened as much as I could so I could recite our favorite comic series, Tintin, with her, along with Ali-Baba poems and other African stories that were included in her French textbooks Matin d ’Afrique. I would often impress my mom when she got home. As much as a pet I was to my sister, I thankfully refrained from eating her homework! In most schools, French courses didn’t begin until third grade, by which time pupils had mastered the Rwandan native language. But my teacher, Martin, turned out to be an exception and started teaching French to us in the second grade.

Being born in late September after the September 1st cut-off, I was two years ahead of my age. Luckily the teacher, who happened to be our family’s friend, accepted me as a part-time student without any hesitation. After the first month as a visiting student, I was already scoring in the top five out of more than thirty students, and there was no way he could continue to keep me part-time. He registered me for school and sent the final list of students to the county school board. I was given the student registration number twenty-one, a number that became my favorite number for life.

All my elementary school, middle school, and high school student registration numbers have been either twenty-one or twenty-three. To top it off, my younger brother’s and son’s birthdays both landed on the twenty-first day of their respective birth months (September and January). 

I finished the first-grade year in the top five and served as the class president who was given the responsibility of the enforcer (the student who kept the class silent with a stick when the teacher went out for a beer). Yes, for a beer. In Rwanda, back then, there were no regulations on consuming alcohol during work hours. There was no age limit either. It was all a matter of personal responsibility. I saw this behavior in Europe too when I visited Venlo on my first business trip in Europe. On that trip, I noticed beers in the cafeteria vending machines for all to drink during lunch!

The same teacher, Martin, continued to instruct us in the second grade, as we were taught to converse in French and memorize multiplication tables. He was one of the best teachers in the county and was always pushing his students to the limits. Before we entered the class, we recited our multiplication tables, and any mistake was met with a switching. To that end, perfection was the norm. This pushed us to be high-performing kids at an early age, not only because of the fear of the stick, but also the hope to one day be the class president and teacher’s pet. Note that this was not the best or most effective way to motivate kids for high performance, and it is actually no longer acceptable in schools.

***

At the end of the second year, I switched schools, moving from our local neighborhood school to one much stricter in terms of language education. The French language speaking requirements were much higher. The teachers at the new school pretended not to understand the Rwandan native language. They started speaking in French all day long, forcing any kid who spoke Kinyarwanda to carry a lock on a string chain around his neck until he found another student also guilty of not speaking French. Talk about a social faux pas! Though harsh, this method of punishment helped increase our fluency in French.

Luckily enough, from an early age, I showed interest in foreign languages, and my sister’s help along with my early training, allowed me to achieve and move beyond any shibboleths of limitation. My foreign language talent was handy in middle school, high school, in China, and even in America on a day-to-day basis. Decades later my proficiency with languages helped me achieve a near-perfect score on the GRE English test for my graduate school application, despite little exposure to English in childhood.

The new school was big and impressive. It encompassed all grades up through eighth and had more than 300 students. It sat atop a plateau, a typical topographical characteristic of the mountainous prefecture of Ruhengeri (which also was replete with rainforests and wildlife). After school, we often had to remind ourselves to get home before dark. Otherwise, we ran the risk of encountering hyenas (even though I never saw one).

At the previous school, we could all go home for lunch, but at our new school, we had to bring in lunch. On the plus side, we had good lunch buddies with whom we hung out with and shared our food. I loved to use traditional hand-crafted food containers, uduseke, made by my auntie, but I lost many of them on the playground at the end of the day, as we kicked around a soccer ball.

My mom often spanked me several times every time I lost a container. But my auntie Anastasia didn’t seem to mind much; she saw this as a new opportunity to show her love by making a better and more colorful one. I cherish her today. She is in her late nineties and my heart melted when I talked to her on the hospital phone after twenty-six years away. God bless her! She recovered well and is still going strong as she approaches her centenary year.

***

As we moved up in grades, I became our fifth-grade teacher’s assistant. With this new role, I was given the task of providing blackboard notes to other students for both math and French classes. I was allowed to proctor exams and grade students. It was a true teaching assistant (TA) job at the elementary school level, and I earned the type of trust and confidence that was needed to carry me further into the future. The prizes for me were free storybooks at the end of the trimester. I was proud of those books and kept them all close to my heart. One of my favorite prizes was the book Imigani Nyarwanda by the legendary Rwandan philosopher and priest Alexis Kagame. This book was packed with more than a hundred stories of Rwandan folklore, which are the basic foundation of Rwandan culture, philosophy, and social order. Their teachings were oriented to young kids, giving them a flavor of how to behave, inspiring courage and tenacity, and inculcating in them the meaning of family and life. This was the beginning of my personal library that would bolster my dedication to education as I grew older. 

In the seventh grade, our teacher was an education major graduate. He grew to become a close friend and a future angel investor, later changing my life forever. He taught with the goal of making a difference for the brightest kids in school. He coached his nephew, Benoit (another close classmate and friend) and I so closely that he gave us special assignments to make sure that we were ready for the upcoming eighth grade national exam, an exam that would define who got to continue to high school.

Sure enough, Benoit and I made it into the math and physics high school program, equivalent to Western STEM programs (Sciences, Technology, Engineering, and Math) that all my children would later attend in the US. This math and physics program also served as a springboard to studying electrical engineering at Zhejiang University. But back to the early years!

The seventh and eighth grade years had been newly introduced in the Rwandan education system to inculcate life skills for most kids who could not otherwise make it to middle and high school due to limited space and available resources. Aside from normal academic programs, we learned about agricultural methodologies, masonry, arts and crafts, as well as particular life skills to survive the harsh reality of normal Rwandan life. These skills were handy for kids returning to rural life after the eighth grade. They could be of great use to themselves and their families: raising chickens, building houses, growing tomatoes and beans, etc.

For me, these two years meant discovery, an opportunity to learn about the human body in books, pictures, writing. I even became exposed to the Bible. Rather than focusing on homework, we often preferred slipping sweet, sometimes amorous letters into other students’ textbooks. We were pre-teens with daydreaming behaviors accompanied by anxiety that came from teenage life.

We worked hard to come to school as early as possible so we could meet up with friends (and attractive girls, in particular) and have some good conversations before class. This act was enough to carry us through rigorous days. Those classmates were sweet and beautiful. Just the idea of being in the company of a girl could make your head spin with joy. Daydreaming was commonplace, and I was no exception. On several occasions, one such girl, Constance, slipped love letters into my school bag, and I kept them under my pillow for months. I read them before bed to stimulate my melatonin for a good night's sleep. 

On Christmas and for Easter Vigils, we did whatever it took to go to midnight mass so that, when it came time to share the peace of Christ, we could hug all the girls we wanted without the feeling of embarrassment. Those daydreams were becoming true in their own sense. Life was good! 

At the big school, I had moved from being in the top five students to being the number one student for all trimesters from fourth grade until eighth. With this performance, I truly became the teachers’ pet throughout those primary years. With the best handwriting at the school, any teacher looking to take a half day off would call me in to help provide the blackboard notes for the whole class. Blackboard notetaking was a common practice at the time with the absence of PowerPoint and the whiteboards you often find in American schools. Everyone needed to take notes from the teacher and sometimes certain texts were written on the blackboard if there weren’t enough textbooks to share. I remember those lengthy French grammar notes that took around two hours each morning. Until college, I referred to these notes in many different areas for general reviews and specifically for national exams. Given these experiences, I was surprised to find blackboards in all Chinese classrooms as well as in all US engineering buildings. Today, whenever I use chalk, the powder sticks in the back of my throat, requiring a long drink of water or tea to clear it up. I could not understand why I did not have this problem as a child. As a grown-up, beer became the best antidote for chalks, pollen, and grass chlorophyll.

 ***

What motivated me to do so well in school?

It is hard to motivate modern day’s kids, especially in the USA. They take so much for granted, especially given their readily accessible array of resources, to be blunt—but this is not a general problem in Africa. In Rwanda (and in China as well), family pride is critical. It takes the center stage of everyone’s life. When you achieve something positive, the whole family benefits. When you fail, your shame accrues to your family. It is their shame too. We all wanted to make our parents proud and become little stars. To that end, there was always a sort of invisible competition going on between each neighborhood kid. Again, family pride was paramount. My father praised me in front of his friends, especially after an evening of good drinking. I never wanted to fail him, and that drive is still in me today. I still feel like he is watching my performance in the background, even though he is no longer with me. He lingers in the shadows just making sure I do not miss a single A+.

My mom cooked a good meal at the end of every trimester just to celebrate my performance. Excellence was expected every time, all the time, and I never failed them once. Excellence is expected became my lifelong motto, and it subsequently became my motto for my kids from an early age.

The main challenge in children’s education in Africa, as you can see, was to have enough textbooks and didactic materials. But with the teachers’ goodwill and the kids’ motivation to learn, these issues were always overcome. The teachers did their best to provide all possible written materials. They explored all possible avenues to help the kids understand the content. The kids themselves then developed creative habits to bolster their learning. One of these habits was working with a study buddy, akin to the manner in which many college students’ study in other countries. These habits had taken root in third or fourth grade, and we would quiz each other to help memorize multiplication tables, French grammar, and French poems. These studying methodologies help bright kids develop strategies to learn and master materials in the form of games and competition. 

It worked well for me, but before the end of primary school, most of the kids were already grown up in mentality and starting to take on adult responsibilities. Case in point: we lost one of our best friends when she got married. This was before she finished the eighth grade. Constance, who often wrote love letters, as I mentioned earlier, apparently attracted the attention of one of the schoolteachers; he married her. I was sad to hear that, but she moved so far away that I never had a chance to ask her what happened. I never had a chance to ask her if she meant what she wrote in those letters to me. I had to destroy them to prevent any future misunderstanding from my teachers, my parents, or myself. My kids who grew up in the States didn’t have to experience this in the literal sense, but all children will lose a friend in some way—frequently without getting the answers they crave—but the next step is always forward.

Besides family pride, another fundamental motivation in pursuing education was to get out of poverty. Many kids realized how opportunities were so limited in the country. Without education, you were stuck at the bottom, and achievement was impossible. They wanted the best for themselves and their families. This is also true in China and India, where the resources are scarce if you are not born into wealth. In Africa and China, given that the government is the prime provider for the nation, one way to access the wealth is to become part of those governments. Without good education, getting into a governmental position is not an option. So, education is the prerequisite to government jobs, and in turn, to wealth and status. In Rwanda, you do not have to be rich or have connections to have access to education. At least, this was not the case for my generation. You needed to be in the top one to two percent. It would propel you into the proverbial ring. If strong enough, you’d avoid getting knocked out and come out safe for the next few rounds before getting to college. 

In China, a mélange of money, relationships, and performance are key. If you perform well on your national exam, you have access to the best school in the country. If you have the right relationships with the right power players, that will work too. If you have money, you can send your kids abroad and show them the best of the Western world. You can see this in the statistics of Ivy League institutions. More than 30 percent of Ivy League students in engineering majors come from Asia. Money talks. Parents are willing to sell everything they have so their kids can go to a good school. In the US, parents will cash out their houses and 401ks for their kids to attend Harvard or Princeton. This pays dividends when the kids graduate. Kids from such backgrounds are the ones who end up dominating the professional world. As I write, around 30 percent of Microsoft Redmond's population is Asian, mainly Indian and Chinese. They are the driving force behind our cloud computing and Office 365. Impressive statistics indeed. Without the sacrifices of their families, their own can-do attitudes and hard work, these achievements would not be possible.

***

But back to my scholastic career. Despite all these achievements, one major weakness of mine was not being adept at domestic chores, ranging from cooking to cleaning and washing clothes to helping with harvesting. My sister did most of the cooking and when she got married, my brother was old enough to take over her chores, sparing me from home responsibilities. This, however, still haunts me, as I never learned how to cook. I still lack culinary skills today. Bottom line: I was an academic child and the most helpful chore I could do well was planting flowers and tending to the garden, especially the roses. The roses were my life. I took care of them as much as I took care of myself.

The Primary National Exam was finally coming, and it was brutal and without mercy. After all these years, it was finally the last year of our primary education, and this exam decided our future. It defined who had the potential to become a mayor, who to be an engineer and who was relegated to live a peasant life in perpetuity. The final year was the year of the national exam, the portal into secondary education in Rwanda. The odds of passing the national exam on average were 1 in 30. Younger kids studied hard along with the older kids who sometimes repeated a year (or multiple years) of school. To be able to repeat the last year of elementary education, you needed to obtain special permission from the superintendent himself and that required a lot of special relationships, social acrobatics, and a bit of bribery. Sometimes it could require changing your birth certificate so you could fit into the age range. Some students came in with fully grown beards that they had to shave daily to look younger and fit in. The younger ones teased them, but they were stronger than us, so we shied away eventually. Most of the time, they did not mind being teased as they simply appreciated their opportunity to try again despite failing several times.

In our final class, we numbered approximately twenty-eight. Our teacher was a younger education major. To teach in high-grade elementary school in Rwanda, at the time, you needed a high school diploma in education. Not every teacher had one, but most of the teachers were very passionate about teaching and had many years of experience, except for a few who had taken advantage of powerful relationships to get teaching jobs. 

Our beloved teacher, Cyprian, became one of my lifelong favorites. We became friends, though that was mainly because of my good grades at school. Later, I joined the same high school as Cyprian but as a different major, math/physics versus his education major. I was also a friend of his nephew who had moved from another school to ours so he could get his uncle's guidance to pass the national exam. After our elementary school graduation, this same teacher went on to Rwanda National University and became our city’s mayor. Later, with the new government formed after the civil war of 1990–1994, he became a cabinet director in the national government's Interior Ministry.

But I digress. Before the national test, we filled out the high school application form and chose three potential majors. Mine were education, foreign language, and law school. Yes, law school. In Rwanda, we started law programs at the high school level. They were comparable to Western paralegal programs.

At the end of the year, only five kids passed the national exam and only two of us had done so on our first attempt, while the other three were in their third or fourth attempt. My national test victory was a family-wide celebration. From siblings to cousins, from aunts to uncles, from friends to classmates, we all marveled at the fact that even one of us made it. I made it into the less than 5 percent lucky enough to go to middle and high school. All hoped that I might one day eventually become one of the top national leaders for years to come. I used most of the summer breaks to visit relatives, sharing this joyful and unique achievement with them. I was showered with gifts and endless celebrations. This made me feel special, and it is the spirit that still energizes me, driving me to do more, always going the extra mile and achieving whatever goal I laid out for myself.

When I passed the national test, to my surprise, I was assigned math and physics as my high school major. The good thing was that the post elementary school at which to purse this major was the one from which my teacher graduated. Of the various schools, it was the closest to my hometown. One of the top two Catholic schools in the nation, it belonged to one of top Catholic school systems in the world, the lucrative Jean Baptiste De La Salle (La Salle for short) high school. The De La Salle congregation’s schools are found all over Europe, in the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia… I could not ask for any more blessings, as I was already blessed. Math and physics majors were the toughest nationwide, but it happened to be the easiest for me due to my good background in math and love for all things scientific. The spirit of always wanting to be excellent, knowing that I could do anything, motivated (and still motivates) me. To this day, if I write a goal down and assign a timeline for its achievement, I always make it happen. I never settle for being average, with the arching principle of B is the worst enemy of A.

***

The summer of 1983 was one to remember, a summer of many transitions. It was not only marked by my success in securing a high school spot, but also by my preparing to leave home, for school and for good. The plan was to stay in China for five years, one for Chinese language and four for college, if all went well. I worked hard for this opportunity, a very expensive and intimidating experience. There was plenty ahead of me, so I took every chance I could to push myself and exceed expectations—those others had of me and those I had of myself.

My sister also got married to Basabose in the same summer. I missed teasing her and trying to hang out with her friends, much to her annoyance. I used to hide her clothes until she agreed to let me join her and her friends at their parties and weddings. Our relationship was always good, but because of the age difference, it was almost a mother/son type of closeness.

She did not know Basabose very well, as they really did not date much but, for some reason, the social pressure to get married was mounting, which started to hover over women around their twenties. The subject arose almost every week during family dinners. They had a happy marriage until the civil war left her without a husband and without a child. He was still young with many dreams yet to be fulfilled. Like many of the Rwandans who lost their spouses during the war, my sister stayed single until her last days in 2019.

That summer was also a summer to remember because of my beloved cousin Pascasie. Growing up together, being one year apart, we shared everything we had, from the sorrow of both of our mom's spankings, to early-morning chores and late-evening home assignments. Her joy was my joy, her pain was my pain, and her happiness was mine as well. We could talk all day long about what was going on in our neighborhood. I could not go to meet my friends at the local market without her. She could not host her friends without me. If she went away for a couple days, I started to miss dinners because I missed her. She was the closest member of my family, more so than my siblings and even my parents. Even today, I have never met a person remotely equal to her. She taught me everything I know about love, kindness, tenderness, and even wisdom. I remember one day when she told me that there is no rain that rains forever. Until today, we have lived with this principle that everything will come to pass.

On another occasion, she told me to make sure I did not die with my wishes. Live your dreams now. Do not take them to the grave. The grave does not forgive losers. It decays them. They will be wasted there and there is no one to live those dreams for you. Pick your dreams now and go make them happen. Without her, I could have become a monster, a smart, technical walking-and-working machine with no emotions whatsoever. Besides my mother, she was the only person who cried when I left home for China on September 1, 1989, at the age of twenty. I could write a whole book about her, but I do not want to make her cry. I did too much of that, and now it is time for her joy. God bless her heart!

Things were different with my brother Irene. I was born to dream to teach. I wanted him to learn, to accumulate as much knowledge as me. Unfortunately, I sometimes forgot that he was in the nascent stages of his elementary education while I was near its conclusion. If he underperformed, I exercised all my authoritative rights to make sure he worked harder. This painful experience for him eased as I grew older and became more understanding.

In late 80’s, China was starting to open up and strengthen their relationships with nations in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. As part of