Paul Rusesabagina was the manager of the Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali, Rwanda. He was a Hutu married to a Tutsi, which in April 1994 made his family a target from every direction. He was born in 1954 in Murama, and by the time the genocide began he was a middle-aged hotel manager — a man whose primary professional skill was making guests comfortable and negotiating room rates. That skill set turned out to be exactly what was needed to save 1,268 lives.
Over seventy-six days, while roughly 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered with machetes across Rwanda, Rusesabagina kept the Mille Collines open. He sheltered refugees inside. He bribed militia leaders with liquor from the hotel bar. He called in favors from foreign contacts. He used the hotel's fax machine to send desperate pleas to anyone in the international community who might listen. Most did not. He kept calling anyway. Every person he sheltered was a person the killers knew was inside. Every day the hotel stood was another day someone could have decided to end the arrangement.
His story became the film "Hotel Rwanda," which made him famous and then made his life more complicated. He has since been imprisoned by the Rwandan government on terrorism charges that Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department have called politically motivated. His legacy is contested, his freedom has been taken, and none of that changes what happened inside those hotel walls in 1994. When the machetes were at the door, he picked up the phone.
"Perhaps the reason the Universe gave you a broken world is so that you could have a chance to fix it."