“There is a need to accept diversity and see it as richness. But not only the physical one, also the diversity of thought”
In Honoré’s family, studying has always been very important, along with the clear awareness that he and his siblings should at least obtain a university degree, even without choosing the same degree course as his father. He was one of the first Rwandan doctors and became director of several hospitals. From 1973, he was called to the capital, Kigali, to take up a government position and other high-level institutional roles, and it was here that Honoré was born and raised. After high school in mathematics and physics, he chose to continue his studies in architecture, but this faculty was not available in his country. At the time, he had a sister who lived near Biella, Italy, and his parents thought it would have been safer to have him near her, and the choice of doing his university studies in Italy was immediate. “I didn’t even think about it, the Turin Polytechnic was proposed to me, and that it was”. Once graduated, his intention was to return to Rwanda to make even a small contribution to building the country.
“I was a 21-year-old boy and when I projected myself into the future, I saw myself designing, and not little houses, but tall buildings. My dream was to see my plans built”.
Honoré has now lived in Italy for almost 35 years and still remembers the day he arrived in Italy in May 1990. For the first few months he lived in Jesi, near Ancona, to attend an intensive Italian language course, and in August moved to Turin. Here, in addition to taking exams, he managed to create a network of friendships with university colleagues and students who lived in his building, people whom he still visits today. And this allowed him to make the most of his university years. After all these years, he can affirm to have had more positive than negative experiences in Italy despite having lived some negative episodes related to being a foreigner. Furthermore, as he frequented the small Rwandan community, which at the time comprised only five people, he did not suffer from any loneliness during the holidays of his Italian friends. And here, he experienced a particular warmth.
“The experiences of a foreigner, socially speaking, are not always negative. It depends perhaps on the environment one can frequent, or the possibility of sharing important things”.
He got this chance through university, where helping and being helped creates bonds that go beyond each person’s ethnicity. And today he feels fortunate, especially when he thinks of immigrants like him who struggle to integrate.
Honoré was supposed to return to Kigali, but the atrocious civil war that broke out in Rwanda in 1994 and caused the genocide of the people of Tutsi ethnicity, changed the country’s history and had a big impact on his life.
“It all started with the shot down of the plane in which the Rwandan president was travelling”.
A carnage that cannot be missed in history books today. “It was one of the most violent stories the world has ever known in terms of the number of people who died in such a short time”. After those atrocious months political stability slowly returned to the country, and today there are scars that have not yet fully healed and who knows, if they ever will.
Unable to return to Rwanda, he started looking for work in Turin in the world of architecture. At first it was difficult, the pay was very low or non-existent and soon, he decided to change fields. He was hired in a multinational company operating in the railway transport sector, where he still works today, and which deals with the planning, production and maintenance of rolling stock and subsystems in the field of signalling. For the first ten years, he worked in the technical engineering department, and then moved to the order management area. His knowledge of English and French are invaluable in his work, and the Rwandan culture, values and customs help him relate to both colleagues and customers. And it is sociability that he misses the most about his country. In Rwanda people live in groups, they show up unannounced and they chat for hours without being a burden or feeling embarrassed. An openness that he misses a lot, along with the smells, the sounds and even hearing only Rwandan being spoken around him.
“I have the impression that in Italy, in order to defend privacy, people give up sociality. In Rwanda, on the other hand, people give up privacy to have the warmth of the community”.
In traditional Rwandan culture, however, those who were alone and had no family connections were sometimes poorly protected. According to Honoré, a country’s true progress cannot be defined solely by technological advancement, it must go hand in hand with the protection of individual rights and freedoms, and political stability. While, in industrial development know-how counts more, in fact, “when there is technological mastery, what you have underground does not matter so much”. In his opinion, the power of the West can be summed up in the famous phrase by E. B. Hall, often attributed to Voltaire, ‘I don’t agree with what you say, but I would give my life so that you can say it’ and thus in the beauty of seeing diversity as a source of wealth rather than a threat, respecting it. He finds moving the peaceful and serene transfer of power as it represents the culmination of a culture that consciously generates peace, well-being and hope through respect for the rules and defence of values.
“There is a need to accept diversity and see it as richness. But not only the physical one, also the diversity of thought”.
Today, Honoré is a project manager and does not believe that these skills and knowledge are what is most needed in his country where, a culture of doing, is generally very important to facilitate growth. Over the years in Italy, Honoré has built his family, and laughing, he says that he has done his part in terms of birth rate, having given Italy – together with his wife – two children. They are both closely connected to their origins and not only because of their father’s stories, or for the time spent in Rwanda, but also thanks to the transmission of the culture by the rest of the family scattered across France, Belgium, Ireland, the United States and Canada. On his first trip to Rwanda, his son one day told him that he felt ‘like someone who has finally come into possession of something that already belonged to him anyway’, words that he holds close to his heart.
In recent years, the Rwandan community in Turin has increased, and thanks to word of mouth there are now about sixty university students. Every time he sees them he gives answers and advice on problems they cannot easily solve and that he experienced many years before them: “in half an hour I become a dad”.