Well-known New York immigration lawyer Jim O’Malley tells Vincent Murphy about his part in the extraordinary story of Deo, a student who escapes genocide in Burundi, only to return years later on a mission to help his people.
The airport policemen wanted to see Deo’s passport and visa and ticket. Deo wanted to know where he should go to pick up his bag.
The policemen looked surprised. One of them asked another question. The woman translates for Deo, “The man asks, ‘Do you know where you are?’”
“Yes,” said Deo, who speaks only French. “New York City.”
She broke into a smile, and translated this for the uniformed men. They looked at each other and laughed, and the woman explained to Deo that he was in a country called Ireland, in a place called Shannon Airport.
- excerpt from Strength in What Remains by Tracey Kidder (2009): Random House
When a young homeless African man walked into Jim O’Malley’s lower Manhattan office in 1995, the Limerick-born immigration lawyer had no idea of the remarkable tale he was about become a character in.
The young man’s name was Deogratias (which translates to “Thanks to God”), and he was brought to the office, by Siobhan McKenna, a friend of O’Malley’s who was a caretaker at a Catholic church in midtown Manhattan.
“He spoke no English, he only spoke French, the colonial language of Burundi,” recalls O’Malley, “She translated his story, and I’d never heard anything like it.
“Actually, I had never heard of the country Burundi in my life. I was aware that genocide had occurred in Rwanda, the neighboring country.
“I just knew what I read in the papers and had seen on TV, but I’d no idea of the dimension from a very personal viewpoint - a person whose family members had been through this, and who had been through it himself.
“It was quite a harrowing story to say the least.”
Deo’s extraordinary story is the subject of the New York Times bestseller Strength in What Remains by the Pullitzer-Prize winning author Tracy Kidder.
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| Deo |
In 1994, when Burundi and Rwanda were exploding in civil war, in which Hutus and Tutsis were slaughtering one another, Deo, a Tutsi, was helped to flee the country.
After several flights, including stopovers in Cairo and Moscow, the young man with no English landed in what he thought was New York, but was actually Shannon Airport in County Clare.
“He thought he was in New York, and got off the plane and asked someone in the duty free shop, how he could get a taxi to Manhattan,” says O’Malley, who ironically grew up in Limerick city just a short journey from Shannon Airport. “To this day we have a good laugh about that. They said: No, you have a few more hours to go yet.”
After arriving in New York with little more than $200 and no English, Deo scraped by. For a period, he lived homeless in Central Park. At another stage, he shared a run-down tenement in Harlem. For work, he delivered groceries from Gristedes supermarket for $15 a day. It was on one of these supermarket deliveries that Deo met Siobhan McKenna – who spoke French – and once she heard his harrowing tale, she took him to O’Malley’s office to see if he could apply for asylum. The process was complicated, but eventually after going to court, Deo was granted political asylum.
And while this was all happening, Deo’s life was taking another extraordinary turn. Having heard about his living arrangements, a married couple living in Lower Manhattan, Charlie and Nancy Wolf, who were friends with both McKenna and O’Malley, took the young African student under their wing. They offered him accommodation, and in a remarkable display of generosity arranged for him to go to Colombia University and even paid his tuition.
“They’re amazing people,” says O’Malley, “He started to live with them here in Manhattan, and they helped him enormously. They helped him go through school, and he enrolled in Columbia University. By this time, which was some months later, I had formally requested political asylum on his behalf, and got him some ID and got him some quasi-legal status while his application was going through the system.”
“He started in Columbia, and was a very bright student. He had been a medical student in Burundi, and did very well in Columbia." After Colombia, Deo went to the Harvard School of Public Health, where he volunteered with Dr Paul Farmer to go to Haiti to study malaria and drug-resistant TB.
Meanwhile, O’Malley was working on translating his asylum status into a green card, and later worked on his successful application for US citizenship.
“We became friends,” says O’Malley, “He has become part of our group of friends and his friends have become our friends.”
At some point, Deo travelled back to Burundi for several weeks, where the violence had died down and a process of reconciliation was underway. But he was appalled by the state of health care there, and vowed on his return to New York to do something about it.
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| Jim O'Malley |
“He described “hospitals” where patients were actually being held captive because they couldn’t pay their bills, so they weren’t released,” recalls O’Malley. “People who had died, their corpses were being held because their family owed money to the hospital. It’s an extremely poor country.”
Deo organized a fundraiser, where he took in several hundred dollars. Jim O’Malley says he thought that Deo would simply send the money raised – the equivalent of maybe a year’s income in local currency – to Burundi. But the medical student had other ideas. “He said, ‘No, I want to use this now as a springboard. I want to build a hospital’ and we thought: Wow - that’s ambitious!” says O’Malley.
Deo started a charity called Village Health Works to raise enough money to build the hospital mostly with local labor in Burundi. He took a year out of medical school and went back to Burundi, where he lived in a tent while the medical center was being built. The resulting facility is a state-of-the-art hospital, with in- and out-patient services, a unit for malnourished infants, and a community centre. There’s even a model farm, where locals are taught how to grow crops.
“People travel on foot for two to three days, from Tanzania, the Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda to get there,” explains O’Malley, “Witch doctors are the only competition. They refer to the hospital as America, it’s really a remarkable place.”
The charity Village Works is now a fully-fledged organization that is completely self-sufficient. All money it raises goes directly to the running and development of the hospital. Plans are currently afoot to build a new wing with a maternity unit.
In December 2009, Jim O’Malley and his wife travelled to Burundi, with Deo and the couple who had “adopted” him, to see the hospital built in the mountainous area where Deo had lived before his exile. “When I arrived and saw it, I don’t think I’d ever seen a place as green in my life,” he said, “It’s absolutely beautiful and extremely fertile. The poverty is astounding, but at the same time the dignity of the people is equally astounding. The beauty of the country is spectacular. The population is very dense. Probably it’s the size of Ireland or smaller but it has 8 or 10 million people. Everyone walks everywhere, there are not a lot of automobiles. A bicycle is a big deal to have in a household.”
Deo wanted to show them the hospital, but on a personal level, he also wanted to introduce his four American friends to his mother and brothers who were still living there. “It was an extraordinary experience for me, personally and professionally. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything like it,” says O’Malley.
For a man who has clients from over 70 different countries, here is one that will always hold a special place in his heart.
Read Deo’s full extraordinary story in Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder, published by Random House (2009) and available in all good bookstores.
Follow the hospital’s progress or donate to Deo’s charity at www.villagehealthworks.com
Find out more about Jim O’Malley at www.omalleyimmigrationlaw.com
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