This 27-Year-Old Launches Drones That Deliver Blood to Rwanda’s Hospitals

In the spring of 1994, Abdoul Salam Nizeyimana’s executioners arrived. It was about two weeks after the Hutu majority-controlled government stepped up its decades-long persecution of the Tutsi minority, calling on citizens to slaughter all Tutsis. Nizeyimana’s family was Tutsi, and it didn’t take long for the killers to come knocking. Nizeyimana, who was three years old at the time, hid under the bed with his mother and two siblings. The father stepped out, probably in an attempt to convince the militia that his family wasn’t home. Nizeyimana heard them talking briefly, and then he couldn’t hear his father talking at all. Having hacked the father to death with their machetes, the men moved into the bedroom and found the rest of the family. The men swung at them, including Nizeyimana, who was struck at the top of his head. Everyone died. Everyone except him.

Nizeyimana remembers the following years only in staccato moments, like disconnected dots on a graph. At one point he was at a homeless shelter for survivors, and at another point his grandmother found him there. She took him in and remembers a studious boy but Nizeyimana remembers it differently. “I was a stubborn kid at school, and I caused a lot of trouble for my grandma,” he says. “The first couple years of school were really, really hard.”